he book upside-down. He
was a very fine Latin scholar, and we tried him with Virgil; he could go
off at score when he had a single line given him, and he scarcely made a
slip, for the poetry seemed ingrained. I have shared a pennyworth of
sausage with the brother of a Chief Justice, and I have played a piccolo
while an ex-incumbent performed a dance which he described, I think, as
Pyrrhic. He fell in the fire and used hideous language in Latin and
French, but I do not know whether that was Pyrrhic also. Drink is the
dainty harvester; no puny ears for him, no faint and bending stalks: he
reaps the rathe corn, and there is only the choicest of the choice in
his sheaves. That is what I want to fix on the minds of young
people--and others; the more sense of power you have, the more pride of
strength you have, the more you are likely to be marked and shorn down
by the grim reaper; and there is little hope for you when the reaper
once approaches, because the very friends who followed the national
craze, and upheld the harmlessness of drink, will shoot out their lips
at you and run away when your bad moment comes.

The last person who ever suspects that a wife drinks is always the
husband; the last person who ever suspects that any given man is bitten
with drink is that man himself. So stealthily, so softly does the evil
wind itself around a man's being, that he very often goes on fancying
himself a rather admirable and temperate customer--until the crash
comes. It is all so easy, that the deluded dupe never thinks that
anything is far wrong until he finds that his friends are somehow
beginning to fight shy of him. No one will tell him what ails him, and I
may say that such a course would be quite useless, for the person warned
would surely fly into a passion, declare himself insulted, and probably
perform some mad trick while his nerves were on edge. Well, there comes
a time when the doomed man is disinclined for exertion, and he knows
that something is wrong. He has become sly almost without knowing it,
and, although he is pining for some stimulus, he pretends to go without,
and tries by the flimsiest of devices, to deceive those around him. Now
that is a funny symptom; the master vice, the vice that is the pillar of
the revenue, always, without any exception known to me, turns a man into
a sneak, and it generally turns him into a liar as well. So sure as the
habit of concealment sets in, so surely we may be certain that the