Page:Through a Glass Lightly (1897, Greg).djvu/52

 these many years agone, but you cannot laugh away Spain’s potent Sherries. They grin at you over the tops of multitudinous vats, and there is never an Englishman but knows the grimace. The wine (the Sherry Wine) is present wherever our language is spoken; its appearance with the soup is as regular as the tureen, and very near as indispensable; a dinner without it were second savagery and mere amorphousness. It is the soul of a cocktail and the body of bitters. You still can drink it in hours when to drink aught else would write you down a “nipper.” No funeral is complete without it, and it is never absent from a wedding, where it affords a pleasant stimulus to the hired waiters. In good old-fashioned houses it is held the only refreshment. It is gifted with a peculiar capacity for penetration;