pig, and an ape, the first being emblematic of man before drink, the second of the effect of wine in moderation, the third the condition of a sot, and the fourtli the senseless chatterings of the imbecile drunk.
In Greek carousals one of the first things to be considered was whether it should be optional or compulsory as to the quantity each should drink.
Intemperance is treated as a vice in one of its phases only. The drunkard, so runs the tone of society, is an immoral beast, whom to scorn and shun is Christian and praiseworthy. Yet wine in moderation is a blessing, and not a curse. So arsenic and strychnine have their uses, otherwise it was a mistake of the creator to have made them.
Like everything else, drinking took on its own form in California. From a drinking-shop arose, outside Sebastopol, the fortified town and famous tower of Malakoff, which in the Crimean war was the cause of so much annoyance to the allied army, from a drinking-shop arose in San Francisco a race of bonanza kings.
Men steeped their souls in drink. Anything was made a pretext—the arrival of news, the 4th of July, the Sunday festivities, the death of a comrade, a hanging scrape, or simply being seized with thirst, and the whole camp would be taken suddenly drunk. There were always those about bar-rooms putting away for years apparently upon the same cigar, and who were never entirely sober, and who hobnobbed, chinked glasses, and drank tete-a-tete with all who would pay the score. Then there were thousands utterly alone in this wilderness of civilized wild men, bowed down to the earth by their misfortunes, to whom forgetfulness obliterating woes was better than memory to keep alive the good, and this forgetfulness many would have at any cost. They would drink themselves into a state of most unbeastly intoxication; they then would go to and drink themselves sober. Then there was the coming out of it, the hardest of
