banished out of existence
along with the other barbarisms, some other institution than the saloon
will have to obtain, some other congregating place of men where strange
men and stranger men may get in touch, and meet, and know.

But to return to my narrative. When I turned my back on Benicia, my way
led through saloons. I had developed no moral theories against drinking,
and I disliked as much as ever the taste of the stuff. But I had grown
respectfully suspicious of John Barleycorn. I could not forget that
trick he had played on me--on me who did not want to die. So I continued
to drink, and to keep a sharp eye on John Barleycorn, resolved to resist
all future suggestions of self-destruction.

In strange towns I made immediate acquaintances in the saloons. When I
hoboed, and hadn't the price of a bed, a saloon was the only place that
would receive me and give me a chair by the fire. I could go into a
saloon and wash up, brush my clothes, and comb my hair. And saloons were
always so damnably convenient. They were everywhere in my western
country.

I couldn't go into the dwellings of strangers that way. Their doors were
not open to me; no seats were there for me by their fires. Also,
churches and preachers I had never known. And from what I didn't know I
was not attracted toward them. Besides, there was no glamour about them,
no haze of romance, no promise of adventure. They were the sort with
whom things never happened. They lived and remained always in the one
place, creatures of order and system, narrow, limited, restrained. They
were without greatness, without imagination, without camaraderie. It was
the good fellows, easy and genial, daring, and, on occasion, mad, that I
wanted to know--the fellows, generous-hearted and -handed, and not
rabbit-hearted.

And here is another complaint I bring against John Barleycorn. It is
these good fellows that he gets--the fellows with the fire and the go in
them, who have bigness, and warmness, and the best of the human
weaknesses. And John Barleycorn puts out the fire, and soddens the
agility, and, when he does not more immediately kill them or make maniacs
of them, he coarsens and grossens them, twists and malforms them out of
the original goodness and fineness of their natures.

Oh!--and I speak out of later knowledge--Heaven forefend me from the most
of the average run of male humans who are not good fellows, the ones cold
of heart and cold of head wh