t who even smoked. Athletics and rifle-practice had much to do
with this, I know, but there has gradually developed all over our
land, notably in those communities where the custom used to be
most honored in the observance, a total revulsion of sentiment.

"Quarter of a century ago, even among many gently nurtured women,
the sight of a man overcome by liquor excited only sorrow and
sympathy; now it commands nothing less than abhorrence. I and my
surviving contemporaries started in life under the old system.
You, my dear boy, are more fortunate in having begun with the new.
Among the old soldiers there are still some few votaries of
Bacchus who have to count their cups most carefully or risk their
commissions. Among those under forty our army has far more total
abstainers than all the others in the world, and such soldiers as
Grant, Crook, Merritt, and Upton, of our service, and Kitchener of
Khartoum, are on record as saying that the staying powers of the
teetotaller exceed those even of the temperate man, and staying
power is a thing to cultivate.

"As you know, I have never banished wine from our table, my boy.
Both your mother and I had been accustomed to seeing it in daily
use from childhood, yet she rarely touches it, even at our
dinners. But, Sanford, I sent John Barleycorn to the right about
the day your blessed mother promised to be my wife, and though I
always keep it in the sideboard for old comrades whose heads and
stomachs are still sound, and who find it agrees with them better
than wine, I never offer it to the youngsters. They don't need it,
Sandy, and no more do you.

"But you come of a race that lived as did their fellow-men,--to
whom cards, the bottle, and betting were everyday affairs. It
would be remarkable if you never developed a tendency towards one
or all of them, and it was my duty to warn you before. I mourn
every hour I wasted over cards and every dollar I ever won from a
comrade more than--much more than--the many hundred dollars I lost
in my several years' apprenticeship to poker. It's just about the
poorest investment of time a soldier can devise.

"Knowing all I do, and looking back over the path of my life,
strewn as it is with the wrecks of fellow-men ruined by whiskey, I
declare if I could live it over again it would be with the
determina