ed
enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment potable and vatted mixtures had
but small lure for my palate, or my stomach, or my temperament. An
occasional mild cocktail before a dinner, and perhaps twice a week a
bottle of light beer or a glass of light wine with the dinner--these, in
those old wild wicked days which ended in January, 1920, practically made
up the tally of my habitual flirtations with the accursed Demon. In the
springtime I might chamber an occasional mint julep, but this, really, was
a sort of rite, a gesture of salute to the young green year. Likewise at
Christmas time I partook sparingly of the ceremonial and traditional
egg-nog. And once in a great while, on a bitter cold night in the winter,
a hot apple toddy was not without its attractions. But these indulgences
about covered the situation, alcoholically speaking, so far as I was
concerned. For me the strong, heady vintages, whether still or sparkling,
and the more potent distillations had mighty little appeal. Champagne, to
me, was about the poorest substitute for good well-water that had ever
been proposed; and the Messrs. Haig & Haig never had to put on a night
shift at the works on my account.

Yet I came from a mid-section of the republic where in the olden days
Bourbon whiskey was regarded as a proper staff of life. The town where I
was born was one of the last towns below Mason & Dixon's Line to stand out
against the local option wave which had swept the smaller interior
communities of America; and my native state of Kentucky was one of the two
remaining states of the South, Louisiana being the other, which had not
officially gone dry by legislative action up to the time when Br'er
Volstead's pleasant little act went over nationally.

While I was growing up, through boyhood, through my youth and on into
manhood, I had the example of whiskey-drinking all about me. Many of our
oldest and most respected families owned and operated distilleries. Some
of them had been distillers for generations past; they were proud of the
purity of their product. Men of all stations in life drank freely and with
no sense of shame in their drinking. Mainly they took their'n straight or
in toddies; in those parts, twenty years ago, the high-ball was looked
upon with suspicion as a foreign error which had been imported by
misguided individuals up North who didn't know any better than to drown
good liquor in charged water. There were decanters on the sideboard; there