Possibly; but how about the inferior stuff which we used to sample, occasionally, in our salad days, when our green judgment led us to pass our early mornings in riotous junketings in the now staid and peaceful region of the Haymarket, S.W.? Much later than those days I have sampled alleged champagne—“extra _sec_,” it was called, though “extra sick” would have been more appropriate—on a race-course, in order to fitly celebrate some famous victory. But in my riper years, the victory (when it occurs) is honoured in more staid and seemly fashion. I was never nearer death by poison than one Friday morning in the ancient city of York, {129} after indulging somewhat freely in the “sparkling” proffered me on the previous day in a booth on Knavesmire. Do what I would—and I walked ten miles, went for a scull on the river Ouse, and then swallowed hot mustard-and-water—the distressing sensations, the great wave of depression which seemed to have swamped the heart, would not quit the body, until—and the idea came as a bolt from the blue—I had summoned up sufficient strength of mind to enter the coffee-room of the principal hotel, and demand a pint of Pommery. It was _not_ a hair of the dog which had bitten me; the mangy brute from the attention of whose fangs I was suffering was no sort of relation to the highly-bred terrier who rooted out the anguish from my soul. And that small pint was so successful that another went the same way. And by that time I had been inspired with nerve enough to face a charging tiger, unarmed. Many learned people, including one section of the medical profession, incline to the belief that consumption of champagne offers direct encouragement to gout. But there is no such idea amongst those employed in the cellars of Moet et Chandon, Geisler, Mum, Pommery, and other large firms. Not that these workmen are allowed to drink as much of their own foaming productions as they have a mind to. As a matter of fact the wine supplied to the _ouvriers_ is the thin red stuff of the district, resembling inferior Burgundy, and not of a very elevating nature. It is not particularly attractive, this life of labour, for nine or ten hours a day, in a damp, cold {130} cellar some fifty yards below the level of the street pavements, with occasionally bottles bursting to right and left of you. These cellars are cut out of the calcareous rock, and were, many of them, inherited from the Romans; and champagne is such a sensitive, exacting sort of wine that it must be stored in the very bowels of the earth, where all is peace and quietude, and where neither motion nor vibration can reach the maturing vintages.