ers and
mothers. And when they come to vote, they will vote for prohibition.
And the best of it is that there will be no hardship worked on the coming
generation. Not having access to alcohol, not being predisposed toward
alcohol, it will never miss alcohol. It will mean life more abundant for
the manhood of the young boys born and growing up--ay, and life more
abundant for the young girls born and growing up to share the lives of
the young men."

"Why not write all this up for the sake of the men and women coming?"
Charmian asked. "Why not write it so as to help the wives and sisters
and mothers to the way they should vote?"

"The 'Memoirs of an Alcoholic,'" I sneered--or, rather, John Barleycorn
sneered; for he sat with me there at table in my pleasant, philanthropic
jingle, and it is a trick of John Barleycorn to turn the smile to a sneer
without an instant's warning.

"No," said Charmian, ignoring John Barleycorn's roughness, as so many
women have learned to do. "You have shown yourself no alcoholic, no
dipsomaniac, but merely an habitual drinker, one who has made John
Barleycorn's acquaintance through long years of rubbing shoulders with
him. Write it up and call it 'Alcoholic Memoirs.'"

CHAPTER II

And, ere I begin, I must ask the reader to walk with me in all sympathy;
and, since sympathy is merely understanding, begin by understanding me
and whom and what I write about. In the first place, I am a seasoned
drinker. I have no constitutional predisposition for alcohol. I am not
stupid. I am not a swine. I know the drinking game from A to Z, and I
have used my judgment in drinking. I never have to be put to bed. Nor
do I stagger. In short, I am a normal, average man; and I drink in the
normal, average way, as drinking goes. And this is the very point: I am
writing of the effects of alcohol on the normal, average man. I have no
word to say for or about the microscopically unimportant excessivist, the
dipsomaniac.

There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man
whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by
numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs,
falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his
ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to
the jokes in the funny papers.

The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most
pleasantly jingled, he