Boiled down in tea (for which, in
the midst of _starvation_, a cockney pays five hundred per cent. beyond
its value, and a tax of five hundred per cent. more than that,) these
centipedes, toads, small alligators, large worms, white bait, snails,
caterpillars, maggots, eels, minnows, weeds, moss, offal in detachments,
gas-juice, vinegar lees, tallow droppings, galls, particles of dead men,
women, children, horses, and dogs, train-oil, copper, dye-stuff, soot,
and dead fish, are all, according to the chemistry of the washerwomen,
neutralized, mollified, clarified, and rectified--but this we doubt; and
if any of the unhappy persons who imbibe nastiness fourteen times a week,
under the idea that it is good and wholesome because it is hot, will
take the trouble to look at the agreeable deposit in the bottom of the
"slop-basin," they will find that independent of all the muddy, fishy,
oily, gaseous, animal and vegetable stuff, introduced into their stomachs
under the guise of that most poisonous of all herbs, tea, they are in the
habit of swallowing mud, earth, stones, sand, and gravel, in quantities
sufficient to establish in less than three months spaces of land as big
as Cornish freeholds in their insides.--_John Bull_.
* * * * *
NAPOLEON.
While Napoleon was a subaltern in the army, a Russian officer remarked,
with much self-sufficiency, "That his country fought for glory and the
French for gain."--"You are perfectly right," answered Napoleon; "every
one fights for that which he does not possess.
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