estion
put to my surprised self.

"Surprised," because in the course of thirty-odd years of literary
life I have had so many opportunities of "showing my hand" upon this
and other great moral issues, and have improved them so diligently
that my readers should by now be tolerably familiar with the platform
on which I stand. Not being a card player, and knowing absolutely
nothing of the technicalities of the game, I am at a loss whether or
not to look for an implication of underhand work in the phrase chosen
by the inquisitor. If she means that I have kept aught back which that
part of the reading public that does me the honor to be interested in
my work has a right to know, I hope in the course of this paper to
disabuse her mind of the impression.

As a means to this end, I wish to put upon record disapproval that
amounts to detestation of the practice of drinking anything that, in
the words of the old temperance pledge I "took" when a child, "will
make drunk come." That was the way it ran. The Rev. Thomas P. Hunt,
one of the best known temperance lecturers in America, used to make us
stand up in a body and chant it, he keeping time with head and hand,
and the boys imitating him.

"We do not think
We'll ever drink
Brandy or rum,
Or anything that makes drunk come"

I have never changed my mind on that head. What I thought then, I
_know_ now, that for half a century I have seen what desolation
drunkenness has wrought in our land. I never see a boy toss off his
"cocktail," or "cobbler", or "sling," or by whatever other
name the devil's brew is disguised, with the mannish, knowing air that
proves him to be as weak as water, when he would have you think him
strong as--fusel oil!--that I do not recall the vehement outburst in
Mrs. Mulock-Craik's "A Life for a Life," of the old clergyman whose
only son had filled a drunkard's grave:

"If I had a son, and he liked wine, as a child does, perhaps--a pretty
little boy, sitting at table and drinking healths at birthdays; or a
schoolboy, proud to do what he sees his father doing--I would take his
glass from him, and fill it with poison--deadly poison--that he might
kill himself at once, rather than grow up to be his friends' curse and
his own damnation--a _drunkard_!"

I lack words in which to express my contempt for the petty ambition,
rooted and grounded in vanity, that urges a young fellow to prove the
steadiness of his brain by tippling what he does not want