t, every pain as
vital and terrible, as on that night.

I was sick for days afterward, and I needed none of my mother's
injunctions to avoid John Barleycorn in the future. My mother had been
dreadfully shocked. She held that I had done wrong, very wrong, and that
I had gone contrary to all her teaching. And how was I, who was never
allowed to talk back, who lacked the very words with which to express my
psychology--how was I to tell my mother that it was her teaching that was
directly responsible for my drunkenness? Had it not been for her theories
about dark eyes and Italian character, I should never have wet my lips
with the sour, bitter wine. And not until man-grown did I tell her the
true inwardness of that disgraceful affair.

In those after days of sickness, I was confused on some points, and very
clear on others. I felt guilty of sin, yet smarted with a sense of
injustice. It had not been my fault, yet I had done wrong. But very
clear was my resolution never to touch liquor again. No mad dog was ever
more afraid of water than was I of alcohol.

Yet the point I am making is that this experience, terrible as it was,
could not in the end deter me from forming John Barleycorn's
cheek-by-jowl acquaintance. All about me, even then, were the forces
moving me toward him. In the first place, barring my mother, ever
extreme in her views, it seemed to me all the grown-ups looked upon the
affair with tolerant eyes. It was a joke, something funny that had
happened. There was no shame attached. Even the lads and lassies
giggled and snickered over their part in the affair, narrating with gusto
how Larry had jumped on my chest and slept under the bridge, how
So-and-So had slept out in the sandhills that night, and what had
happened to the other lad who fell in the ditch. As I say, so far as I
could see, there was no shame anywhere. It had been something
ticklishly, devilishly fine--a bright and gorgeous episode in the
monotony of life and labour on that bleak, fog-girt coast.

The Irish ranchers twitted me good-naturedly on my exploit, and patted me
on the back until I felt that I had done something heroic. Peter and
Dominick and the other Italians were proud of my drinking prowess. The
face of morality was not set against drinking. Besides, everybody drank.
There was not a teetotaler in the community. Even the teacher of our
little country school, a greying man of fifty, gave us vacations on the
occasions