“We are a friend of the temperance movement, and want it to succeed; but what chance can it have when a man can take a rip-saw and go out and get drunk with a fence-rail? What is the use of a prohibitory liquor law if a man is able to make brandy-smashes out of the shingles on his roof, or if he can get delirium tremens by drinking the legs of his kitchen chairs? You may shut up an inebriate out of a gin shop and keep him away from taverns, but if he can become uproarious on boiled sawdust and desiccated window-sills, any effort must necessarily be a failure.” I can believe in the ability of most German chemists to do most things; and possibly {77} sawdust is used in the Fatherland for the manufacture of lager beer, Rhine Wine, and—but ’tis a saw subject. The pure brandy at Cognac is divided into two principal classes—“champagne” brandy, from grapes grown on the plains, and “bois” brandy, the product of wooded districts—I am _not_ alluding now to sawdust—and the last-named variety is subdivided into many different names. It takes eight and a half gallons of wine to furnish one gallon of spirits; and the ravages of the vine-louse have made a terrible difference in the supply. In fact, the amount produced in 1897 was about one-tenth of the amount produced twenty years previously. But thanks to beet-root, potatoes, and—other things, the distiller manages to “get” there just the same. But the man who wrote in 1889, prophesying the speedy disappearance of pure _eau de vie_ from the market, was probably not far wrong. “It would seem on the whole,” he wrote, “that unless the phylloxera be stamped out, pure brandy will soon be a thing of the past.” But they do not tell you this in saloon-bars, and places where they drink.