Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 22, 2025
"I'll try at any rate," said the other. "Water-drinker, moody thinker," and Peregrine sang a word or two from an old drinking-song. "I am not quite sure of that. We Englishmen I suppose are the moodiest thinkers in all the world, and yet we are not so much given to water-drinking as our lively neighbours across the Channel."
Chesterfield, another of the contributors to The World, inserted in it a short character of him under the name of Cantabrigiensis, introduced by an encomium on his temperance; for he was a water-drinker. That he was what is commonly termed a news-monger, appears from the following laughable story, told by the late Mr. George Hardinge, the Welch Judge:
"Architecture is poetry turned into stone, according to the old aphorism, and you, no doubt, have something of the poet in you." He glanced at the thin and rather bloodless face, and at the high cheekbones of the water-drinker as he spoke.
If you had taken my advice, my poor fellow," I went on, gaining courage as I spoke, "and become a water-drinker, like me " "Curse you and your water-drinking! If you had had no water to drink or wash with for two years but that that," pointing to the foul ditch below "if you had emptied the slops in there with one hand, and filled your kettle with the other "
A water-drinker, provided he is a profess'd one, and does it without fraud or covin, is precisely in the same predicament: not that, at first sight, there is any consequence, or show of logic in it, 'That a rill of cold water dribbling through my inward parts, should light up a torch in my Jenny's
I ran down to the cabin, taking with me the midshipman of the watch, the quarter-master, and two other steady men; and having laid the water-drinker in his bed, I noted down the date, with all the particulars, together with the names of the witnesses, to be used as soon as we fell in with the admiral.
I was, therefore, a great water-drinker, not altogether from choice, but from the salt nature of my food, and because my mother had still sense enough left to discern that "Gin wasn't good for little boys." But a great change had taken place in my father.
If, reader, you have ever looked through a solar microscope at the monsters in a drop of water, perhaps you have wondered to yourself how things so terrible have been hitherto unknown to you you have felt a loathing at the limpid element you hitherto deemed so pure you have half fancied that you would cease to be a water-drinker; yet, the next day you have forgotten the grim life that started before you, with its countless shapes, in that teeming globule; and, if so tempted by your thirst, you have not shrunk from the lying crystal, although myriads of the horrible Unseen are mangling, devouring, gorging each other in the liquid you so tranquilly imbibe; so is it with that ancestral and master element called Life.
Hence, youth seeks a preeminence in vice, and age in folly; hence, many boast of errors they would not commit, or claim distinction by investing themselves with an imputation of excess in some popular absurdity duels are courted by the daring, and vaunted by the coward he who trembles at the idea of death and a future state when alone, proclaims himself an atheist or a free-thinker in public the water-drinker, who suffers the penitence of a week for a supernumerary glass, recounts the wonders of his intemperance and he who does not mount the gentlest animal without trepidation, plumes himself on breaking down horses, and his perils in the chace.
Putting down with a shaking hand a long glass emptied of its contents paid for by Heyst he said, with that deliberate sagacity which no mere water-drinker ever attained: "Heyst's a puffect g'n'lman. Puffect! But he's a ut-uto-utopist." Heyst had just gone out of the place of public refreshment where this pronouncement was voiced. Utopist, eh?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking