sound and
continue drinking. So I decided to stop drinking and keep sound. I
noticed that a good many men of the same age as myself and the same
habits as myself were beginning to show signs of wear and tear. A
number of them blew up with various disconcerting maladies and a number
more died. Soon after I was forty years of age I noticed I began to go
to funerals oftener than I had been doing--funerals of men between
forty and forty-five I had known socially and convivially; that these
funerals occurred quite regularly, and that the doctor's certificate,
more times than not, gave Bright's Disease and other similar diseases
in the cause-of-death column. All of these funerals were of men who
were good fellows, and we mourned their loss. Also we generally took a
few drinks to their memories.

Then came a time when this funeral business landed on me like a
pile-driver. Inside of a year four or five of the men I had known best,
the men I had loved best, the men who had been my real friends and my
companions, died, one after another. Also some other friends developed
physical derangements I knew were directly traceable to too much
liquor. Both the deaths and the derangements had liquor as a
contributing if not as a direct cause. Nobody said that, of course; but
I knew it.

So I held a caucus with myself. I called myself into convention and
discussed the proposition somewhat like this:

"You are now over forty years of age. You are sound physically and you
are no weaker mentally than you have always been, so far as can be
discovered by the outside world. You have had a lot of fun, much of it
complicated with the conviviality that comes with drinking and much of
it not so complicated; but you have done your share of plain and fancy
drinking, and it hasn't landed you yet. There is absolutely no
nutriment in being dead. That gets you nothing save a few obituary
notices you will never see. There is even less in being sick and
sidling around in everybody's way. It's as sure as sunset, if you keep
on at your present gait, that Mr. John Barleycorn will land you just
as he has landed a lot of other people you know and knew. There are two
methods of procedure open to you. One is to keep it up and continue
having the fun you think you are having and take what is inevitably
coming to you. The other is to quit it while the quitting is good and
live a few more years--that may not be so rosy, but probably will have
compensations."

I