may be uncharitable—may smack of Puritanism and may not be supported by general facts; but I am writing about my own experiences, not those of any other person whatever.

My occupation takes me to all parts of the world and has for twenty-five years. It has caused me to make friends with all sorts of people in all sorts of places and in all sorts of circumstances. I early discovered that, as I was a gregarious person and intent on doing the best for myself that I possibly could, it was necessary for me to cultivate the friendship of men of affairs; and it became apparent to me that many men of affairs take an occasional drink. Naturally I took an occasional drink with them, having no prejudices in the matter and being of open mind. I am big and husky, and mix well; and the result was I acquired as extensive a line of convivial acquaintances, across this country and across Europe, as any person of your acquaintance. To some extent my friendship with these men was predicated on having a few drinks with them. I fell in with their ways or they fell in with mine; and as my association in almost every city, among the men with whom I worked and the men I met, is based largely on entertainment of one kind or another—generally with some alcohol in it—my life was ordered that way for two decades. And I had a heap of fun. There was no sottishness about it, no solitary drinking, no drinking for drink's sake, no drunkenness. It was all jollity and really innocent enough—a case of good fellows having a good time together.

However, there was a good deal of rum consumed one way and another. Then three and a half years ago, after a long caucus with myself, I quit. I decided I had played that game long enough and would begin to play another. It may be I did not know or figure out as concretely as I have figured out since just what I was doing when I quit. It may be! Still, that has nothing to do with the case. I quit and I have stayed quit—and I have quit forever. So all that is coming to me in the premises is based on my own determination, as all has been that has come, and I have no complaints to make; and if I made any I should expect to get a punch in the eye for making them—and deserve one.

Passing over the physical and mental sides of the fight—which, I may assure you, were annoying enough to suit the most exacting advocate of the old policy of mortifying the flesh and disciplining the mind—there came eventually the necessity of learning how to keep in the game on a water basis—or, rather, of learning how to keep in such portions of the game as seemed worth while on a soft-drink schedule. I was too old to form many new ties. I had accumulated a farflung line of drinking men as friends. They were mostly the men with whom association was a pleasure—as in politics the villains are always the good fellows—and I did not want to lose them, however willing they were to lose me.

There came, however, with my mineral-water view, a discriminatory sense that was not enjoyed in the highball period—that is to say, I found, observed with the cold and mayhap critical eye of abstinence, that a number of those with whom I was wont to associate needed the softening glow radiated by the liquor in me to make them as good as I had previously thought they were. There were some I found I did not miss, and more came to the same conclusion about me. They were all right—fine!—when seen or heard through ears and eyes that had been affected by the genial charitableness of a couple or three cocktails; but when seen or heard with no adventitious appliances on my part save ginger ale they were rather depressing—and I am quite sure they held the same views about me.

V: A Thirsty Nation's Need

So I sloughed off a good many and a good many sloughed off me; and a working basis was secured. At first I tried to keep along with all the old crowd, but that was impossible in two ways. I never realized until after I was on the water-wagon what extremes in piffle I used to think was witty conversation, and they discovered speedily that my non-alcoholic communications fitted in neither with the spirit nor the spirits of the occasion.

The crying need of the society of this country is a non-alcoholic beverage that can be drunk in quantities similar to the quantities in which highballs can be drunk. A man who is a good, handy drinker can lap up half a dozen highballs in the course of an evening—and many lap up considerably more than that number and hold them comfortably; but the man does not exist who can drink half of that bulk of water or ginger ale, or of any of the first-aids-to-the-non-drinkers, and not be both flooded and foundered. The human stomach will easily accommodate numerous seidels of beer, poured in at regular or irregular intervals; but the human stomach cannot and will not take care of a similar number of seidels of water, or of any other liquid that comes in the guise of stuff that neither cheers nor inebriates. I have never looked up the scientific reason for this. I state it as a fact, proved by my own attempts to accomplish with water what I used easily to do with highballs, Pilsner and other naughty substances.

The reformer boys will tell you there is no special need for such a drink; that water is all-sufficient. Of course everybody knows the reformer boys think the world is going to hell in a hanging basket unless each person in it comports himself and herself as the reformer boy dictates! But it is not so. And it is so that the social intercourse, the interchange of ideas between man and man, both in this country and in every other country, is often predicated on drinking as a concomitant.

We may bewail this, but we cannot dodge it. Hence any man who has been used to the normal society of his fellows along the lines by which I became used to that society, and along the lines by which ninety per cent of the men in this country become used to that society, must make a bluff at drinking something now and then. If he is not a partaker of alcohol he has his troubles in finding a medium for his imbibing, unless he goes the entire limit and cuts out the society of all friends who drink, which leaves him in a rather sequestrated and senseless position—not, of course, that there are not plenty of interesting men who do not drink, but that so many interesting men do.

So the problem of a non-drinker resolves itself to this: How can he continue in the companionship of the men he likes, and who possibly like him, and not drink? How can he remain a social animal, with the fellowship of his kind, and stay on the water-wagon? Well, it is a difficult problem, especially for persons situated as I was, who had spent twenty years accumulating a large assortment of acquaintances who used the stuff in moderation, but with added social zest to their goings and comings.

When a man first stops drinking he is likely to become censorious. That starts him badly. Also he is likely to become serious. That marks him down fifteen points out of a possible thirty. He flocks by himself, thinking high thoughts about his purity of purpose, his vast wisdom, his acute realization of the dangers that formerly beset his path and now beset the path of all those who are not walking side by side and in close communion with him. He pins medals all over himself, pats himself on the chest, and is much better than his kind.

Then he wakes up—unless he is a chump and a Pharisee. If he is one or both of those he never wakes up, but soon passes beyond the pale. When he wakes up—assuming he has