Last night, in honour of a small anniversary and in defiance of war economy, we had a bottle of Bern-hastler with our dinner. Really I do not know a better wine for drinking with a meal except a good Burgundy, and for that, of course, the menu should be framed accordingly. French white wines always seem to me a trifle heavy, and the Rhine wines have a sort of metallic under-flavour which I don't care for. But the Moselles are, to my taste, perfect, nicely balanced between sweetness and acidity and full of flavour without being heavy.
How true the Psalmist was when he sang of "wine that maketh glad the heart of man," though I have won-of "dachs-hund," or "badger-dog," implies, Still, there is an ancient enough animal of somewhat similar appearance in this country which was used for the more humane but somewhat humdrum purpose of turning a spit; so it is quite open to any sensitive dachshund-owner to maintain that his or her favoured specimen owes nothing at all to "kultur" but goes right back to some honest-to-goodness English baronial kitchen. In any event, all the numerous specimens usually seen in England acquired British nationality by birth, having been born and bred there for several generations.
But that was a nice touch about the little beast with the floppy ears being "in very early history Egyptian." After all, when you come to think of it, the dachshund in some of its aspects does look a bit like a hieroglyphic of the gayer sort. True, one has not hitherto associated it with the ibis and the crocodile, but it is never too late to start. Perhaps Cleopatra was a dachshund fan and used to play with them when she was tired of asps and Antonys,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.