s on the water-wagon what extremes in piffle I used to think
was witty conversation, and they discovered speedily that my
non-alcoholic communications fitted in neither with the spirit nor the
spirits of the occasion.

The crying need of the society of this country is a non-alcoholic
beverage that can be drunk in quantities similar to the quantities in
which highballs can be drunk. A man who is a good, handy drinker can lap
up half a dozen highballs in the course of an evening--and many lap up
considerably more than that number and hold them comfortably; but the
man does not exist who can drink half of that bulk of water or ginger
ale, or of any of the first-aids-to-the-non-drinkers, and not be both
flooded and foundered. The human stomach will easily accommodate
numerous seidels of beer, poured in at regular or irregular intervals;
but the human stomach cannot and will not take care of a similar number
of seidels of water, or of any other liquid that comes in the guise of
stuff that neither cheers nor inebriates. I have never looked up the
scientific reason for this. I state it as a fact, proved by my own
attempts to accomplish with water what I used easily to do with
highballs, Pilsner and other naughty substances.

The reformer boys will tell you there is no special need for such a
drink; that water is all-sufficient. Of course everybody knows the
reformer boys think the world is going to hell in a hanging basket
unless each person in it comports himself and herself as the reformer
boy dictates! But it is not so. And it is so that the social
intercourse, the interchange of ideas between man and man, both in this
country and in every other country, is often predicated on drinking as a
concomitant.

We may bewail this, but we cannot dodge it. Hence any man who has been
used to the normal society of his fellows along the lines by which I
became used to that society, and along the lines by which ninety per
cent of the men in this country become used to that society, must make a
bluff at drinking something now and then. If he is not a partaker of
alcohol he has his troubles in finding a medium for his imbibing, unless
he goes the entire limit and cuts out the society of all friends who
drink, which leaves him in a rather sequestrated and senseless
position--not, of course, that there are not plenty of interesting men
who do not drink, but that so many interesting men do.

So the problem of a non-drinker resolves itsel