1903 The Flowing Bowl by Edward Spencer

iig THE FLOWING BOWL yet will men drink of the waters, for although absinthe makes the heart grow blacker, and the pulse more feeble, men—and, occasionally women —will continue, as long as there is a world, to do the thing they ought not to do. With which moralising let us pass to the next objectionable drink. Arrack. This is an East Indian name, derived from the Arabic, for all sorts of distilled spirits, but chiefly for the " toddy," or palm-liquor obtained from the cocoa-palm, as also from rice, and the coarse brown sugar known to the natives as "jaggery." "Toddy," when fresh, is a delicious drink, and bears no sort of relationship to whisky- toddy. An almost nude male swarms up a cocoa-palm—assisted by a rope which encircles his ankles and the trunk of the tree—early in the morning, and fetches down the vessel which has been fastened up atop, overnight, to catch the sap which has dripped from the incisions made in the tree. That sap, in -its raw state, is delicious —especially with a dash of rum in it; but it ferments rapidly, and usually turns sour in three or four days. Then the natives distil, and make "arrack" of it—a liquor which is sold in the bazaars and drunk on the occasion ofa hurra din^ or festival. Nor is its use confined to natives. The British soldier drinks it, faute de micux •, and occasionally the British officer. Poor B , who was in my old regiment, had fuddled himself into such astate ofstupidity, that all liquor was forbidden him by the doctor's