minute. Take a mixture of alum, salt, and
copperas, ground fine, and stir into your beer, and this will make it
froth handsomely. Cocculus indicus, tobacco-leaves, and stramonium,
cooked in the beer, etc., give it force. Potash is sometimes stirred
into wine to correct acidity. Sulphite of soda is now very commonly
stirred into cider, to keep it from fermenting further. Sugar of lead is
stirred into wines to make them clear, and to keep them sweet. And so
on, through the whole long list.

It is a curious instance of people's quiet acknowledgment of their own
foolishness, that a popular form of the invitation to take a drink is,
"Come and h'ist in some pizen!"

I know of no plan by which anybody can be sure of obtaining pure liquor
of any description. Some persons always purchase their wines and liquors
while they are under the custom-house lock and consequently before they
have reached the hands of the importer. Yet there are scores of men in
New York and Philadelphia who have made large fortunes by sending whisky
to France, there refining, coloring, flavoring, and doctoring it, then
re-shipping it to New York as French brandy, paying the duty, and
selling it before it has left the custom-house! There is a locality in
France where a certain brand of wine is made. It is adulterated with
red-lead, and every year more or less of the inhabitants of that
locality are attacked with "lead-colic," caused by drinking this
poisoned wine right at the fountain-head where it is made. There is more
bogus champagne drank in any one year, in the city of Paris alone, than
there is genuine champagne made in any one year in the world. America
ordinarily consumes more so-called champagne annually than is made in
the world, and yet nearly all the genuine champagne in the world is
taken by the courts of Europe. The genuine Hock wine made at
Johannisberg on the Rhine is worth three dollars per bottle by the large
quantity, and nearly all of it is shipped to Russia; yet, at any of the
hotels in the village of Johannisberg, within half a mile from the
wine-presses of the pure article, you can be supplied for a dollar per
bottle with what purports to be the genuine Hock wine. Since chemistry
has enabled liquor dealers to manufacture any description of wine or
liquor for twenty-five cents to a dollar a gallon, there are annually
made and sold thousands of gallons of wine and brandy that never smelt a
grape.

Suppose a wholesale liquor-merchant