g the
house after an evening's work, and more and more he drifted down to the
Corners--that is, the cross-roads where were the postoffice and the
blacksmith-shop and the general store. He liked to be with the other
fellows. He liked human companionship; and since his fellows drank, he
began to drink with them. It is needless to explain how the habit grew
upon him. The man who drinks whisky affects his stomach, and the
stomach affects the nerves, and there is a sort of arithmetical
progression until the stimulant eventually seems to become almost a part
of life; and the man, unless he be one of great force of character, or
one most knowing and scientific, must yield eventually to the stress of
close conditions. Time came when John Appleman yielded, and carried
whisky home in a gallon jug and hid it in the haymow.

Need does not exist for any going into details, for telling of what
happened at the cross-roads store, of what good stories were related day
by day and week by week and month by month, while the cup went round; it
is sufficient to say that the stomach of John Appleman became querulous
when he had not taken a stimulant within a limited number of hours, and
that he was in a fair way of becoming an ordinary drunkard. With his
experience and decadence came, necessarily, an expertness of judgment as
to the quality of that which he drank. He could tell good liquor from
bad, the young from the old.

It came that, being thoughtful and imaginative, John Appleman decided
that he, at least, should drink better liquor than did tipplers in
general. He would not be seen a weakly vagrant, buying his jugful at the
corner store; neither would he drink raw liquor. He would buy it in
quantity and let it age upon his farm, and so with each replenishing of
the jug from his private store would come an increase in quality derived
from greater age, until in time each daily tipple would be an absorption
of something so smooth and potent that immediate subsequent existence
would be a thing desirable in all ways. And John Appleman had a plan.

The Appleman barn and house stood perhaps three hundred yards apart,
near the crest of what was hardly worthy the name of hill, which sloped
downward into what they called the "flats," through which the creek ran.
The barn stood very close to uncleared woodland, and the banks ending
the woodland showed a decidedly rocky exterior. Appleman, chasing a
woodchuck one day, had seen him scurry into a h