walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor
falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his
body but his brain that is drunken. He may bubble with wit, or expand
with good fellowship. Or he may see intellectual spectres and phantoms
that are cosmic and logical and that take the forms of syllogisms. It is
when in this condition that he strips away the husks of life's healthiest
illusions and gravely considers the iron collar of necessity welded about
the neck of his soul. This is the hour of John Barleycorn's subtlest
power. It is easy for any man to roll in the gutter. But it is a
terrible ordeal for a man to stand upright on his two legs unswaying, and
decide that in all the universe he finds for himself but one
freedom--namely, the anticipating of the day of his death. With this man
this is the hour of the white logic (of which more anon), when he knows
that he may know only the laws of things--the meaning of things never.
This is his danger hour. His feet are taking hold of the pathway that
leads down into the grave.

All is clear to him. All these baffling head-reaches after immortality
are but the panics of souls frightened by the fear of death, and cursed
with the thrice-cursed gift of imagination. They have not the instinct
for death; they lack the will to die when the time to die is at hand.
They trick themselves into believing they will outwit the game and win to
a future, leaving the other animals to the darkness of the grave or the
annihilating heats of the crematory. But he, this man in the hour of his
white logic, knows that they trick and outwit themselves. The one event
happeneth to all alike. There is no new thing under the sun, not even
that yearned-for bauble of feeble souls--immortality. But he knows, HE
knows, standing upright on his two legs unswaying. He is compounded of
meat and wine and sparkle, of sun-mote and world-dust, a frail mechanism
made to run for a span, to be tinkered at by doctors of divinity and
doctors of physic, and to be flung into the scrap-heap at the end.

Of course, all this is soul-sickness, life-sickness. It is the penalty
the imaginative man must pay for his friendship with John Barleycorn.
The penalty paid by the stupid man is simpler, easier. He drinks himself
into sottish unconsciousness. He sleeps a drugged sleep, and, if he
dream, his dreams are dim and inarticulate. But to the imaginative man,
John Barleycorn sends the pi