MADEIRA
mon rooms of Oxford colleges a knowledge of mixed oaths and the now dead languages. He appears at fitful intervals at the tables of men who have heavy and loaded clarets, and ports that are of little good save to administer to the dying poor to accelerate their end. Now the reason of this is not far to seek. He is such a mysterious fellow that he has hobnobbed with a man’s ancestors, and has taken up an abode in their cellars, and comes down to this ignorant generation by an accident of bequest or intestacy, and these modern heirs bring him out with a sort of mixed pride and diffidence, offering him as some old wine which “my grandfather” was sometime the possessor of; and few take him at a venture, lest, haply, he should pinch up their toes, and bring into their knuckle-joints those
77
