Porter and other malt liquors are favorite subjects for the analysis of the microscopic man.  As you are placidly enjoying your pint of GUINNESS’S brown stout, he will look at you for minutes with a compassionate smile.  Then, suddenly plunging into his favorite horror knee-deep, he will ask you if you know what becomes of all the ends of smoked-out cigars.  Of course you submit that little boys pick them up and smoke them to everlasting annihilation.  “Pshaw! sir,” exclaims the microscopic person; “there is a man in the City of Dublin, sir—­I believe he is a baronet now, but will not force that as a fact—­and he made an enormous fortune by going about the streets at early dawn and picking up all the cigar-stumps he could find, and they were not few, as you may suppose, in that smokingest of cities.  He used to furnish these by the ton to old GUINNESS, who used them for giving color and body to his famous ‘Stout.’  Body?—­I should think so rather!—­but only think where the body came from!  Just recall to mind the filthiest gutter that ever you saw in your life, with the numerous ends of cigars that you perfectly remember having observed sweltering in it, and then take another pull at your GUINNESS, sir, and I wish you joy of it, sir!”

Once we remember to have heard the subject of the possibility of lizards snakes, frogs, and other cheerful reptiles having resided for indefinite periods in the stomachs of human subjects, discussed in the presence of the microscopic man.  A lady of the party was skeptical on the subject, dwelling especially upon the impossibility of any person swallowing a reptile unawares.  “Observe those water-cresses of which you have been partaking so freely, madam,” said the microscopic man.  “Beneath each leaf I discern ova of things that it might horrify you to enumerate in full.  Suffice it to say, then, for the present, that on the leaves of this small sprig culled by me at random from the cluster, are to be detected the germs of the trigonocephalus contortrix, than which, when fully developed, no more deadly reptile wriggles upon earth.  See this minute agglomeration of yellowish specks on the stalk of the cress.  These are the eggs of the lacerta horrida, a lizard that within the large warts with which its epidermis is studded secretes a poison of the most virulent character.  Others, too, I discern, but they are too disagreeable to dwell upon—­not to speak of one having them dwell inside one, instead—­ha! ha!  Now, remember that all these germs are hatched by gentle warmth.  No degree of temperature that we know of is more gentle than that of the human stom—­”

At this point the lady fainted, and the microscopic man was thrown promptly out of the window by her husband, who has since been presented by a committee of grateful citizens with a gold-mounted cane, as a mark of consideration for his services in ridding the world of a monster.

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