Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. A thirsty country—Swizzles—Georgetown Club—Visits of the fleet— Swizzleiana—Pepper-pot—Miss Gerty's kitten—Planters—Mr. Henry Clementson—His burglary—Medical Service—Old-time doctors— The Bar—Dick Whitfield—Lynch— Samuel T. Fitz-Herbert—Macaronic verses—Church endowments—Cake walks—Rally of the tribes —Ladies in British Guiana—Sexual relations—Establishments— Children of the poor—Quasi-slavery—Roman Dutch law—Emancipation of women—Tigress of Tiger Bay—Tim Sugar—Assaulting the sheriff. These is great truth in the soldier's remark that Demerara was a " rare place where there's lots of drink, and you're always 'a dry." The perpetual state of perspiration in which one lives in the colony creates a perpetual thirst, and I know no place where drinking is carried out on more scientific principles. The drink, sui generis, of the country is the swizzle. This subtle and delicious compound is sometimes ignominiously confounded with the cocktail, but though related, they are not identical. The cocktail is a stronger, shorter, and less sophisticated drink than the swizzle; there is no disguise about it; you know you are drinking something hot and strong, thinly disguised by the ice which cools without quenching its potency. But in the swizzle the potency is so skilfullyveiled that the unsuspecting imbiber never discovers he is taking anything stronger than milk, until he finds that his head is going round, and that the road seems to be rising up and trying to slap him in the face. The ingredients of a swizzle are simple enough; a small glass of hollands, ditto of water, half a teaspoonful of Augostura bitters, a small quantity of syrup or powdered white sugar, with crushed ice ad libitum; this concoction is whipped up by a swizzle-stick twirled rapidly between the palms of...