“I love a dog!” exclaimed a lively young girl, patting a big St. Bernard.

“Would I were a dog!” sighed an amorous dude.

“Oh, you’ll grow!” retorted the fair one, consolingly.

I feel like plagiarizing the saucy hit, in witnessing the desperate efforts aforementioned on the part of our mistaken boy.  Sometimes (let us thank a merciful heaven that this is so!) he does grow out of the folly, and into manly self-contempt at the recollection of it.  Often—­ah!—­the pity and the shame of it!

If somebody were to make it fashionable to take belladonna, aconite or prussic acid in “safe” doses, three, or six, or a dozen times a day in defiance of all the medical science in the world, the would-be man would never be content until he had overcome natural repugnance to the “bitters,” and rate himself as so much higher in the scale of being by the length of time his constitution could hold out against the deadly effect of the potation—­plume himself upon his superiority to men who killed themselves by taking a like quantity.  To drink one glass of wine or spirits a day is to venture upon thin ice; when the one glass has become the three that our boy must have, it is but a question of time how soon the treacherous crust will give way.

Clearly, then—­so clearly that it is difficult to see how anybody, however blinded by self-conceit, can fail to perceive it—­the only safe thing is to let liquor as a beverage alone.  The practice is, at the best, like kindling the kitchen fire every morning with kerosene.  Insurance agents are slow to take risks upon property where this is the rule.

Nobody is so besotted as to ask, “Does dram-drinking pay?” There is not a sane man or woman in America who would hesitate in the reply, and the answers would all be the same.

If he is a fool who tempts the approach of appetite that may—­that does in seventy-five times out of one hundred—­become deadly and incurable disease, what shall we say of the “strong head” that espies no sin in social convivialities with the weak brother?  Let me tell one or two stories of the score that rush upon my memory with the approach to this part of my subject.

Forty years ago I sat down to the dinner-table of a man who stood high in the community and church.  He was a liberal liver, as his father had been before him.  That father had taken his toddy tri-daily for seventy years, and died in the odor of sanctity.  They could do such things in that day, and never transcend the three-glass limit.  My godly grandfather did the same, and was never one whit the worse for liquor in his life. Their sons and grandsons cannot do it without ruining themselves, body and soul.

I italicize the sentence.  I wish I could write it in letters of fire over the door of every liquor saloon.

It may be the climate; it may be the high-pressure, fever-heated rate of modern living; it may as well be that those honest men who made their own apple whiskey and peach brandy, by their daily dram-drinking transmitted the taste which adulterated liquors, in the generation following, were to lash into uncontrollable appetite.