enced it
admit it, and those who have experienced it comment on it as some
miracle of health that has been attained. Any man--I do not care who he
is--who was the sort of a drinker I was, who will stop drinking long
enough to get cooled out will feel so much better in every way that he
will be hard put to it to give a reason for ever beginning again.

Take my own case: I was fat, wheezy, uric-acidy, gouty, rheumatic--not
organically bad, but symptomatically inferior. I was never quite
normal--no man is normal who has a few drinks each day, though most men
boast they never were under the influence of liquor in their lives, and
all that sort of tommyrot--and never quite up to the mark.

Now I weigh one hundred eighty-five pounds, which is my normal weight,
for that is what I weighed when I was twenty-one; and I have not varied
five pounds in more than two years. I used to weigh two hundred and
fifty, which was the result of our friend Pilsner beer and his
accomplices. All the gouty, rheumatic, wheezy symptoms are gone. If
there is anything the matter with me the best doctors in these United
States cannot discover what it is. My eye is clear, instead of somewhat
bleary. I have dropped off every physical burden and infirmity I had,
and I am in the pink of condition. I have no fear of heart, kidneys, or
of any other organ. I have no pains, no aches, and no head in the
morning. I sleep as a well man should sleep and I eat as a well man
should eat. I am forty-five years old and I feel as if I were
twenty--and I am, to all intents and purposes, physically.

So much for that side of it. Mentally I have a clearer, saner, wider
view of life. I am afflicted by none of the desultoriness superinduced
by alcohol. I do not need a bracer to get me going or a hooker to keep
me under way. I find, now that I know the other side of it, that the
chief mental effect of alcohol, taken as I took it, is to induce a
certain scattering and casualness of mind. Also, it induces a lack of
definiteness of view and a notable failure of intensive effort. A man
evades and scatters and exaggerates and makes loose statements when he
drinks.

_IX: Alcohol and the Toll it Takes_

And let me say another thing: One of the reasons I quit was because I
noticed I was going to funerals oftener than usual--funerals of friends
who had been living the same sort of lives for theirs as I had been
living for mine. They began dropping off with Bright's disea