They Climb the Eiffel
Tower and the Old Man Gets Converted.

Paris, France.--Old Pardner in Crime: I got your letter, telling me
about the political campaign that is raging at home, and when I read it
to dad he wanted to go right out and fill up on campaign whisky and yell
for his presidential candidate, but he couldn't find any whisky, so he
has not tried to carry any precincts of Paris for our standard-bearer.

There is something queer about the liquor here. There is no regular
campaign beverage. At home you can select a drink that is appropriate
for any stage of a campaign. When the nominations are first made you are
not excited and beer and cheese sandwiches seem to fit the case A little
later, when the orators begin to come out into the open and shake their
hair, you take cocktails and your eyes begin to resemble those of a
caged rat, and you are ready to quarrel with an opponent. The next stage
in the campaign is the whisky stage, and when you have got plenty of it
the campaign may be said to be open, and you wear black eyes and lose
your teeth, and you swear strange oaths and smell of kerosene, and only
sleep in the morning. Then election comes and if your side wins you
drink all kinds of things at once for a week, shout hoarsely and then
go to the Keeley cure, but if your party loses you stay home and take a
course of treatment for nervous prostration and say you will never mix
up in another campaign.

Here in France it is different. The people have nervous prostration to
start on, start a campaign on champagne, wind up on absinthe, and after
the votes are counted go to an insane asylum. I do not know what first
got dad to drink absinthe and I don't know what it is, but it looks like
soap suds, tastes like seed cookies and smells like vermifuge. But it
gets there just the same and the result of drinking it is about the same
as the result of drinking anything in France--it makes you want to hug
somebody.

At home when a man gets full of whisky, he wants to hug the man he
drinks with and weep on his collar, and then hit him on the head with
a bottle; but here every kind of drink puts the drinker in condition to
want to hug. Dad says he never knew he had a brain until he learned to
drink absinthe, but now he can close his eyes and see things worse than
any mince pie nightmare, and when we go out among people he never sees
a man at all, but when a woman passes along, dad's eyes begin to take
turns winking a