Mix the whites of six eggs with twelve gallons of spring-water; add twenty pounds of the best virgin honey and the peeling of three lemons; boil it an hour, and then put into it some rosemary, cloves, mace, and ginger; when quite cold add a spoonful or two of yeast, tun it, and when it has done working stop it up close. In a few months bottle it off, and deposit in a cool cellar. If this liquor is properly kept, the taste of the honey will go off; and it will resemble Tokay both in strength and flavour. And the chief objection to this as to other ancient potations, appears to be the intolerable quantity of water, whether “spring” or “fair.” We do not make Birch wine nowadays, although the Birch itself frequently makes small boys whine, after conviction of orchard-robbing, or train-wrecking. But it was a favourite tipple with our ancestors, who during the month of March were wont to cut the ends off the birch-boughs, and let the sap drip into bottles suspended from the boughs. For twopence or threepence a gallon the villagers would catch this sap for {31} their wealthier neighbours, regardless of the feelings, and the cartridges, of the owners of the trees. To every gallon of liquor was added a pound of refined sugar, the mixture being boiled for half an hour or so, then set to cool, with a little yeast added thereto, to make it ferment. The result was then put in barrels, together with a small proportion of powdered mace and cinnamon. A month afterwards it was bottled off, and when drunk was said to be “a most delicate, brisk wine, of a flavour like unto Rhenish.” “The Vertues of the Liquor or Blood of the Birch-tree,” says the historian, “have not long been discovered, we being beholding to the Learned Van Helmont for it; who in his _Treatise of the Disease of the Stone_ hath very much applauded its Vertues against the effects of the Disease, calling the natural Liquor that flows from the wounded Branches of the Tree, the meer Balsom of the Disease. Ale brewed therewith, as well as the Wine that is made of it, wonderfully operates on the Disease. It is also reputed to be a powerful Curer of the Ptisick.” All the same you will hardly get the _alumni_ of Eton and Harrow to love their birch. “What was _Sack_?”