I never enjoyed profanity as I enjoyed it then—­more than if I had been uttering it myself.  There is nothing like listening to an artist—­all his passions passing away in lava, smoke, thunder, lightning, and earthquake.

Then this friend said to me:  “Now, I will tell you about that.  About sixty years ago that man was a young fellow of twenty-three, and had just come home from a three years’ whaling voyage.  He came into that village of his, happy and proud because now, instead of being chief mate, he was going to be master of a whaleship, and he was proud and happy about it.

“Then he found that there had been a kind of a cold frost come upon that town and the whole region roundabout; for while he had been away the Father Mathew temperance excitement had come upon the whole region.  Therefore, everybody had taken the pledge; there wasn’t anybody for miles and miles around that had not taken the pledge.

“So you can see what a solitude it was to this young man, who was fond of his grog.  And he was just an outcast, because when they found he would not join Father Mathew’s Society they ostracized him, and he went about that town three weeks, day and night, in utter loneliness—­the only human being in the whole place who ever took grog, and he had to take it privately.

“If you don’t know what it is to be ostracized, to be shunned by your fellow-man, may you never know it.  Then he recognized that there was something more valuable in this life than grog, and that is the fellowship of your fellow-man.  And at last he gave it up, and at nine o’clock one night he went down to the Father Mathew Temperance Society, and with a broken heart he said:  ’Put my name down for membership in this society.’

“And then he went away crying, and at earliest dawn the next morning they came for him and routed him out, and they said that new ship of his was ready to sail on a three years’ voyage.  In a minute he was on board that ship and gone.

“And he said—­well, he was not out of sight of that town till he began to repent, but he had made up his mind that he would not take a drink, and so that whole voyage of three years was a three years’ agony to that man because he saw all the time the mistake he had made.

“He felt it all through; he had constant reminders of it, because the crew would pass him with their grog, come out on the deck and take it, and there was the torturous Smell of it.

“He went through the whole, three years of suffering, and at last coming into port it was snowy, it was cold, he was stamping through the snow two feet deep on the deck and longing to get home, and there was his crew torturing him to the last minute with hot grog, but at last he had his reward.  He really did get to shore at fast, and jumped and ran and bought a jug and rushed to the society’s office, and said to the secretary: 

“’Take my name off your membership books, and do it right away!  I have got a three years’ thirst on.’