regarded by too many in these
days is one of the most painful examples of want of confidence. Look at
these glasses. He who could mistrust poison in this wine would mistrust
consumption in Hebe's cheek. While, as for suspicions against the
dealers in wine and sellers of it, those who cherish such suspicions can
have but limited trust in the human heart. Each human heart they must
think to be much like each bottle of port, not such port as this, but
such port as they hold to. Strange traducers, who see good faith in
nothing, however sacred. Not medicines, not the wine in sacraments, has
escaped them. The doctor with his phial, and the priest with his
chalice, they deem equally the unconscious dispensers of bogus cordials
to the dying."

"Dreadful!"

"Dreadful indeed," said the cosmopolitan solemnly. "These distrusters
stab at the very soul of confidence. If this wine," impressively holding
up his full glass, "if this wine with its bright promise be not true,
how shall man be, whose promise can be no brighter? But if wine be
false, while men are true, whither shall fly convivial geniality? To
think of sincerely-genial souls drinking each other's health at unawares
in perfidious and murderous drugs!"

"Horrible!"

"Much too much so to be true, Charlie. Let us forget it. Come, you are
my entertainer on this occasion, and yet you don't pledge me. I have
been waiting for it."

"Pardon, pardon," half confusedly and half ostentatiously lifting his
glass. "I pledge you, Frank, with my whole heart, believe me," taking a
draught too decorous to be large, but which, small though it was, was
followed by a slight involuntary wryness to the mouth.

"And I return you the pledge, Charlie, heart-warm as it came to me, and
honest as this wine I drink it in," reciprocated the cosmopolitan with
princely kindliness in his gesture, taking a generous swallow,
concluding in a smack, which, though audible, was not so much so as to
be unpleasing.

"Talking of alleged spuriousness of wines," said he, tranquilly setting
down his glass, and then sloping back his head and with friendly
fixedness eying the wine, "perhaps the strangest part of those allegings
is, that there is, as claimed, a kind of man who, while convinced that
on this continent most wines are shams, yet still drinks away at them;
accounting wine so fine a thing, that even the sham article is better
than none at all. And if the temperance people urge that, by this
course, he