and get him
drunk. If I persuaded him, with his limited calibre, into drinking up
with me, I'd surely get him drunk. What could I do but steal that every
second drink, or else deny myself the kick equivalent to what he got out
of half the number?

Please remember, as I recite this development of my drinking, that I am
no fool, no weakling. As the world measures such things, I am a
success--I dare to say a success more conspicuous than the success of the
average successful man, and a success that required a pretty fair amount
of brains and will power. My body is a strong body. It has survived
where weaklings died like flies. And yet these things which I am
relating happened to my body and to me. I am a fact. My drinking is a
fact. My drinking is a thing that has happened, and is no theory nor
speculation; and, as I see it, it but lays the emphasis on the power of
John Barleycorn--a savagery that we still permit to exist, a deadly
institution that lingers from the mad old brutal days and that takes its
heavy toll of youth and strength, and high spirit, and of very much of
all of the best we breed.

To return. After a boisterous afternoon in the swimming pool, followed
by a glorious ride on horseback over the mountains or up or down the
Valley of the Moon, I found myself so keyed and splendid that I desired
to be more highly keyed, to feel more splendid. I knew the way. A
cocktail before supper was not the way. Two or three, at the very least,
was what was needed. I took them. Why not? It was living. I had always
dearly loved to live. This also became part of the daily schedule.

Then, too, I was perpetually finding excuses for extra cocktails. It
might be the assembling of a particularly jolly crowd; a touch of anger
against my architect or against a thieving stone-mason working on my
barn; the death of my favourite horse in a barbed wire fence; or news of
good fortune in the morning mail from my dealings with editors and
publishers. It was immaterial what the excuse might be, once the desire
had germinated in me. The thing was: I WANTED alcohol. At last, after a
score and more of years of dallying and of not wanting, now I wanted it.
And my strength was my weakness. I required two, three, or four drinks
to get an effect commensurate with the effect the average man got out of
one drink.

One rule I observed. I never took a drink until my day's work of writing
a thousand words was done. And, wh