appy tone to
this brightly-constituted gentleman.

CHAPTER III

OLD VEUVE

They were known at the house of the turtle and the attractive Old Veuve:
a champagne of a sobered sweetness, of a great year, a great age,
counting up to the extremer maturity attained by wines of stilly depths;
and their worthy comrade, despite the wanton sparkles, for the promoting
of the state of reverential wonderment in rapture, which an ancient wine
will lead to, well you wot. The silly girly sugary crudity his given way
to womanly suavity, matronly composure, with yet the sparkles; they
ascend; but hue and flavour tell of a soul that has come to a lodgement
there. It conducts the youthful man to temples of dusky thought:
philosophers partaking of it are drawn by the arms of garlanded nymphs
about their necks into the fathomless of inquiries. It presents us with a
sphere, for the pursuit of the thing we covet most. It bubbles over
mellowness; it has, in the marriage with Time, extracted a spice of
individuality from the saccharine: by miracle, one would say, were it not
for our knowledge of the right noble issue of Time when he and good
things unite. There should be somewhere legends of him and the
wine-flask. There must be meanings to that effect in the Mythology,
awaiting unravelment. For the subject opens to deeper than cellars, and
is a tree with vast ramifications of the roots and the spreading growth,
whereon half if not all the mythic Gods, Inferior and Superior, Infernal
and Celestial, might be shown sitting in concord, performing in concert,
harmoniously receiving sacrificial offerings of the black or the white;
and the black not extinguishing the fairer fellow. Tell us of a certainty
that Time has embraced the wine-flask, then may it be asserted (assuming
the great year for the wine, i.e. combinations above) that a speck of the
white within us who drink will conquer, to rise in main ascension over
volumes of the black. It may, at a greater venture, but confidently, be
said in plain speech, that the Bacchus of auspicious birth induces ever
to the worship of the loftier Deities.

Think as you will; forbear to come hauling up examples of malarious men,
in whom these pourings of the golden rays of life breed fogs; and be
moved, since you are scarcely under an obligation to hunt the meaning, in
tolerance of some dithyrambic inebriety of narration (quiverings of the
reverent pen) when we find ourselves entering the circle of a