lcoholic disguise, than I have at
this present moment that the setting sun will see me under arrest for
picking somebody's pocket of a steam saw-mill. Strolling about yesterday
for some time, I became tired of the monotonous hurry of Broadway, and
eventually strayed into that delightful rural locality which you call, I
think, the Bowery.

"On the corner of this avenue of the rustic cognomen and Broome street,
there is a place of refreshment for the weary. I entered its open doors,
and sat down in a little three-sided closet, determined to procure the
wherewithal to refresh the inner individual. Obedient to my upraised
finger, a person came. This person had on a small white apron; this
person also flourished in his dexter-digits a napkin of questionable
purity; this person wore slippers, and had a voice like an asthmatic
bull-frog; this person was a city waiter--a male waiter--a degeneration
of the genus homo, which I sincerely hope will, at no very distant day,
become utterly extinct. He procured for me the viands which my
capricious taste selected from the suggestive printed list of edibles
there to be obtained. While engaged in consigning to a living grave the
bivalves he had brought, I had a fair opportunity to observe some, to
me, remarkable gymnastics then in course of accomplishment by an active
young man who presided at the bar, and held dominion over the bottles.
First pouring into a tumbler some liquid, to me unknown, diluting it
with water, adding ice, sugar, lemon, and other ingredients with which I
am unacquainted, he proceeded to throw the compound about in the most
unheard-of manner, from one tumbler to another, over his head, under his
leg, round his neck, over one arm and under the other, without ever
spilling a drop. First uplifting one hand high in air, he poured the
mixture in a sparkling cascade from the glass in the right hand, to that
in the left; then he threw it in a sparkling shower in the air, till the
lumps of ice rattled on the ceiling; then he dispersed it in a misty
spray about his head and recovered it all in his magic glass, by some
diabolic dexterity, without losing the fraction of a drop; then, in one
grand, final effort, he tossed it round the beer-pump, down one side,
and up the other, and over the chandelier, changing a two-dollar bill
while it was in the air, and giving his customer his drink with one
hand, and with the other his silver change, intermixed with twenty per
cent. of pe