e
most genial men; unworried by the transient, they can smile and wait,
sure of their eternal aim. The man to whom the infinite beckons is not
to be driven from his mystic quest by the ambush of a temporal fear;
there is no fear--it has ceased to exist. That is the comfort of a true
philosophy--if a man accepts it not merely mechanically, from another,
but feels it in breath and blood and every atom of his being. With a
warm surety in his heart, he is undaunted by the outer world. That,
gentlemen, is what thought can do for a man."

"By Jove," thought Gourlay, "that's what whisky does for me!"

And that, on a lower level, was what whisky did. He had no conception
of what Tam really meant; there were people, indeed, who used to think
that Tam never knew what he meant himself. They were as little able as
Gourlay to appreciate the mystic, through the radiant haze of whose mind
thoughts loomed on you sudden and big, like mountain tops in a sunny
mist, the grander for their dimness. But Gourlay, though he could not
understand, felt the fortitude of whisky was somehow akin to the
fortitude described. In the increased vitality it gave he was able to
tread down the world. If he walked on a wretched day in a wretched
street, when he happened to be sober, his mind was hither and yon in a
thousand perceptions and a thousand fears, fastening to (and fastened
to) each squalid thing around. But with whisky humming in his blood he
paced onward in a happy dream. The wretched puddles by the way, the
frowning rookeries where misery squalled, the melancholy noises of the
street, were passed unheeded by. His distracted powers rallied home; he
was concentrate, his own man again, the hero of his musing mind. For,
like all weak men of a vivid fancy, he was constantly framing dramas of
which he was the towering lord. The weakling who never "downed" men in
reality was always "downing" them in thought. His imaginary triumphs
consoled him for his actual rebuffs. As he walked in a tipsy dream, he
was "standing up" to somebody, hurling his father's phrases at him,
making short work of _him_! If imagination paled, the nearest tavern
supplied a remedy, and flushed it to a radiant glow. Whereupon he had
become the master of his world, and not its slave.

"Just imagine," he thought, "whisky doing for me what philosophy seems
to do for Tam. It's a wonderful thing the drink!"

His second session wore on, and when near its close Tam gave out the
subje