Notes will conduce more effectually than
anything that has ever been written or spoken
on the subject.

OUR EYE-WITNESS AT THE DOCKS.

THE subjoined report of our Eye-witness
requires a word or two of explanation.

It was sent in in the usual form, was printed,
and corrected for publication, when a letter
arrived from our contributor couched in terms
of great anxiety and alarm. He trusted it was
not too late to cancel his report and substitute
another which he enclosed. The first (that which
he wished to be destroyed), was written on the
evening of the day on which he had passed
through the experience it described, and he had
reason to fear that it was not so intelligible as
might have been wished. He had written this
unlucky paper, while suffering from a rather
serious attack of indisposition— an indisposition
of a very curious and alarming kind— its principal
symptoms, a slight giddiness and confusion of
the head, a great difficulty in the choice of terms,
a singular facility of getting into sentences,
an inconceivable inability to get out of them
again. Nay, our unhappy contributor went so
far as to say that this confusion and giddiness of
head had reached so terrible a point at last, that
he was unable to find the opening of his inkstand
when he wanted a fresh dip of the fluid
which it contained, and that his pens became
blunted at the points as fast as he took them
up, in consequence of their being brought in
violent contact with the rim of his ink-bottle every
time he made a plunge at that vessel. He added,
that he was wholly unable to explain this attack.
He had passed the day in visiting— with
Eye-witnessing views— the London Docks with a
few friends and a " tasting order;" he had
returned in the evening, had written his report of
their expedition and had sent it in; but, next day,
remembering the severe attack of illness under
which he had been suffering while he
prepared his article, it had occurred to him that
the paper in question must have suffered
from his indisposition, and consequently he
begged, as above stated, to cancel it. Our
E. W. concluded his letter by saying that he
has not been so curiously ill, since the night
when his old friend Strongwaters was called to
the Bar.

This communication arrived too late. The first
report had been printed and irrevocably fixed in
its present place; consequently, the only thing
left to be done, was, to introduce this word of
explanation before it, and to subjoin the second
report, at the end of that which had been
previously admitted. The first document runs
thus:

Your attached servant and Eye-witness is
perfectly competent to send in his report.

Who dares to say otherwise? Who dares to
say that he is not in a condition to explain
lucidly the present state of the Wine Trade?

Who dares to say, or rather insinuate, that your
servant, going on a great and responsible
mission of calm and judicious inquiry— going, in
short, as your servant— could so far forget himself
as to lose, even for a moment, that deep
sense of duty with which let those who are not
impressed with the full measure of the responsibility
which attaches to the position of a public
servant say is other than one calculated to tame
and subdue the most mercurial and careless
spirits among us, and much more that, or rather
those— those, let us repeat, of one who at all
times and in all places, conscious that his object
is the improvement, the instruction, and the
amusement of his fellow-men, is never more so,
and rarely so much so, as at a moment such as
this which he is about to describe when plungng,
for the benefit of others, into the bowels of
the earth, armed with a lantern, and attended by
a ministering gnome provided with a gimlet,
wine-glasses, spigots, and an adze (or cooper's
axe), he wanders during many hours of a winter
afternoon among casks, pipes, butts, and many
other appurtenances of the wine trade, as
connected with the export and import of that which
has been styled by one whom your Eye-witness
is not the man to disparage the enemy which —
Oh! that a man should put it in his mouth to
steal away his brains. Not that it does steal
away the brains of any but those who have but
a small and feeble allowance of brains to steal;
for has not your Eye-witness passed the whole
day in tasting and swallowing— and how should
he do otherwise than swallow, it being too good
to waste?— the wine which his dear friends
Beeswing and Crust furnished him with access
to, accompanying him themselves, one on each
side, and providing him, as has been already
stated, with a gnome who, furnished with a
gimlet, would plunge the same into any cask,
pipe, or butt, before which your servant chose to
stop, and cause a beautiful stream of purple or
amber-coloured liquid, as the case might be, to
pour forth: which, being caught in a glass of
great size and allowed to play upon it for a while
in order to clean it outside and in, as the
frequenters of drinking fountains cleanse the leaden
stoup out of which they are going to drink (only
in this case it is cleansed with precious wine
and in the other with inexpensive water), and
then handing the wine-glass so prepared and
filled with wine of inconceivable merit, and not
holding it by the stem but by the flat bottom on
which it stands when it is put down, and it is
impossible to put it down till you have drunk
what it holds because there is nothing but round
casks to put it down upon, and the wine-glass
will not stand upon a round surface, for your
Eye-witness tried it and broke four glasses in
his attempts to steady them; but what he wishes
to say is, that this man handing him incessantly
these glasses full of ports, sherries, and
Madeiras, which last is the favourite wine of your
servant, albeit a liquor which, being but a poor
man to whom the luxuries indulged in by the
rich and powerful are little known, is one that
he seldom tastes, and, indeed, so much the