leavings and scrapings of the vineyards and the vats,
and it tasted far worse than beer. There is only one way to take
medicine, and that is to take it. And that is the way I took that wine.
I threw my head back and gulped it down. I had to gulp again and hold
the poison down, for poison it was to my child's tissues and membranes.

Looking back now, I can realise that Peter was astounded. He half-filled
a second tumbler and shoved it across the table. Frozen with fear, in
despair at the fate which had befallen me, I gulped the second glass down
like the first. This was too much for Peter. He must share the infant
prodigy he had discovered. He called Dominick, a young moustached
Italian, to see the sight. This time it was a full tumbler that was
given me. One will do anything to live. I gripped myself, mastered the
qualms that rose in my throat, and downed the stuff.

Dominick had never seen an infant of such heroic calibre. Twice again he
refilled the tumbler, each time to the brim, and watched it disappear
down my throat. By this time my exploits were attracting attention.
Middle-aged Italian labourers, old-country peasants who did not talk
English, and who could not dance with the Irish girls, surrounded me.
They were swarthy and wild-looking; they wore belts and red shirts; and I
knew they carried knives; and they ringed me around like a pirate chorus.
And Peter and Dominick made me show off for them.

Had I lacked imagination, had I been stupid, had I been stubbornly mulish
in having my own way, I should never have got in this pickle. And the
lads and lassies were dancing, and there was no one to save me from my
fate. How much I drank I do not know. My memory of it is of an age-long
suffering of fear in the midst of a murderous crew, and of an infinite
number of glasses of red wine passing across the bare boards of a
wine-drenched table and going down my burning throat. Bad as the wine
was, a knife in the back was worse, and I must survive at any cost.

Looking back with the drinker's knowledge, I know now why I did not
collapse stupefied upon the table. As I have said, I was frozen, I was
paralysed, with fear. The only movement I made was to convey that
never-ending procession of glasses to my lips. I was a poised and
motionless receptacle for all that quantity of wine. It lay inert in my
fear-inert stomach. I was too frightened, even, for my stomach to turn.
So all that Italian crew looked