The cellar was perfectly dry, so that no moisture collected anywhere. I may remark, by the way, that a dry cellar is always desirable. There was no moisture, but there was a liberal supply of dust and cobwebs. On bottles that had been in their places only a few years, there would be a slight film or covering of dust. Those that could boast of twenty years, and those that had remained undisturbed a hundred or two hundred years, were covered so thickly that it was almost impossible to distinguish the bottles from the mass which covered them. I saw one shelf—I forget its age—where not a bottle was visible; it seemed to be a mass of cobwebs, and nothing more. To judge from its appearance, I would not have given twenty-five cents for the contents of that shelf; but if I had offered twenty-five hundred dollars, my offer would have been spurned with disdain. I asked the value of the wine on this shelf, and was told that it was twenty guineas a bottle. I did not want any of it at that price, but I presume that there are plenty of men in the world who are ready to pay it. After we had seen the curiosities of the place, the proprietor insisted that we should make a practical test of his wine. He did not open any of the twenty-guinea stuff, and we could not expect him to, though I secretly hoped he would consider himself sufficiently honored by our presence to do the handsome thing, and break a bottle or two of it just to give us a taste. The best he would do was to open a ten-guinea bottle from another shelf. It is not every day you can smack your lips over wine worth fifty dollars in gold a bottle, and we sipped it very carefully, and allowed it to trickle not too rapidly down our throats. I found it a very agreeable wine; it had a rich and fruity, though rather sweetish taste. I know nothing to which it can be compared, and therefore I will not make any comparison. [Sidenote: WINE TASTING AND ITS EFFECT.] The proprietor treated us on the descending scale, for the next bottle he brought us was a five-guinea one. It was only forty or fifty years old, a very juvenile stuff, but we were unable to discover any great difference between it and the other. Two or three kinds of this wine were shown us, and then he brought all sorts of new wines just in the cellar, that is to say, they had only been there some five or ten, or it may be twenty years. Other wines were brought forward for our deglutition; and after a time the thing became a little monotonous, and I suspected that we might get our heads and feet a little tangled. I suggested that we had other business to attend to, and had better not indulge in the wine business any longer; but the proprietor was polite, and was constantly offering us just one more sample. “Have the gentlemen taste this one,” he would say to the officer who accompanied us, and at the urgent request of the officer we would indulge the proprietor.