licensed them. They were not the terrible places I heard boys deem them
who lacked my opportunities to know. Terrible they might be, but then
that only meant they were terribly wonderful, and it is the terribly
wonderful that a boy desires to know. In the same way pirates, and
shipwrecks, and battles were terrible; and what healthy boy wouldn't give
his immortal soul to participate in such affairs?

Besides, in saloons I saw reporters, editors, lawyers, judges, whose
names and faces I knew. They put the seal of social approval on the
saloon. They verified my own feeling of fascination in the saloon.
They, too, must have found there that something different, that something
beyond, which I sensed and groped after. What it was, I did not know;
yet there it must be, for there men focused like buzzing flies about a
honey pot. I had no sorrows, and the world was very bright, so I could
not guess that what these men sought was forgetfulness of jaded toil and
stale grief.

Not that I drank at that time. From ten to fifteen I rarely tasted
liquor, but I was intimately in contact with drinkers and drinking
places. The only reason I did not drink was because I didn't like the
stuff. As the time passed, I worked as boy-helper on an ice-wagon, set
up pins in a bowling alley with a saloon attached, and swept out saloons
at Sunday picnic grounds.

Big jovial Josie Harper ran a road house at Telegraph Avenue and
Thirty-ninth Street. Here for a year I delivered an evening paper, until
my route was changed to the water-front and tenderloin of Oakland. The
first month, when I collected Josie Harper's bill, she poured me a glass
of wine. I was ashamed to refuse, so I drank it. But after that I
watched the chance when she wasn't around so as to collect from her
barkeeper.

The first day I worked in the bowling alley, the barkeeper, according to
custom, called us boys up to have a drink after we had been setting up
pins for several hours. The others asked for beer. I said I'd take
ginger ale. The boys snickered, and I noticed the barkeeper favoured me
with a strange, searching scrutiny. Nevertheless, he opened a bottle of
ginger ale. Afterward, back in the alleys, in the pauses between games,
the boys enlightened me. I had offended the barkeeper. A bottle of
ginger ale cost the saloon ever so much more than a glass of steam beer;
and it was up to me, if I wanted to hold my job, to drink beer. Besides,
beer was foo