HONOR BIRTH OF COCKTAIL.

(Washington Dispatch in New York Morning Telegraph.)

Citizens of Washington crossed the District of Columbia line to-day to join with residents of Bladensburg, a nearby Maryland town to celebrate the eightieth anniversary of the invention of that more or less famous American drink—cocktail. As yet, it has not done its home town, Bladensburg, the same service by which less potent beverage made Milwaukee famous.

The delegation from Washington returned at an early hour to-day with enthusiastic, if more or less incoherent, accounts of the festival and narratives of the origin of the seductive and sometimes insidious concoction.

The most definite chronicle is that on July 15, 1836, Col. John Hopkins, Fairfax, Va., entered the Palo Alto Inn at Bladensburg, which was kept by a genial host named Jack Henderson, and asked Mr. Henderson to mix him a drink that would make him feel better. With sugar and whisky and some other Ingredients Mr. Henderson made a soothing beverage the fame of which Col. Hopkins spread abroad. How it came to be called a cocktail deponent sayeth not.

Mr. Henderson has passed away, and his cocktail is known as the “old-fashioned.” It is yet in favor though the generic name of cocktail now covers a multitude of sins and virtues of the bartender's art. American bars have been instituted in the cities of Europe, so that wanderers from the shores of the United States and sympathetic confreres on the other side may be supplied with the cocktail, of which there are so many varieties that sometimes, receiving an order for a new one, the most sophisticated “doctors” can only look wise, say nothing and “take a chance.”