spread it was, and as for the wine I seem to sniff its "bouquet" now.

Some of the old Birmingham men whose characteristic hospitalities I have
just described had, as is pretty well known, certain habits which,
looked at by modern light, would seem somewhat plebeian. For instance,
there were men of wealth and importance who made it their custom often
to go and spend an hour or two in the evening at some of the old
respectable hotels and inns of the town. They had been in the habit of
meeting together at these hostelries in their earlier days to talk over
the news, at a period when daily local newspapers were not published,
and they adhered to the custom in their advanced years and wealthier
position, and rejoiced in visiting their old haunts and smoking their
long clay pipes, and having a chat with old friends and kindred spirits.

All this has died out now. For one thing, most of these old inns and
hostelries have disappeared with the march of modern times. We have
clubs now and restaurants, also hotels, where visitors "put up," but the
old-fashioned inns and taverns have mostly gone. The present generation
of prosperous well-to-do men, too, are of a different stamp from their
predecessors. They do not take their ease at their inns after the manner
of their fathers. They have been educated differently, and take their
pleasures in a more refined way, as is the fashion of the time.

Some of them have been to public schools and to the university, and
they naturally live their lives on a more elevated level. As a rule,
they are good, practical, straightforward, worthy men, though there are,
of course, some who are rather amusing in their little pretentious
ways--as there are in all large communities. Many of these, finding
themselves well off, begin to discover they had ancestors. They name
their houses after places where their grandfathers lived or should have