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CHAPTER XXII.

DRINKING.

Over wide streams and mountains great we went And, save when Bacchus kept his ivy-tent, Onward the tiger and the leopard pants

With Asian elephants: We follow Bacchus! Bacchus on the wing

A-conquering! Bacchus, young Bacchus! good or ill betide W^e dance before him through kingdoms wide Come hither, lady fair, and joined

To our wild minstrelsy.

— Keats' Endymion.

A NOT unfitting opening for some reflections on life would be a dissertation on death. Were there no death the term life would have no sio-nificance. Did we not love life we should not fear death. However full of hateful conditions earthly existence may be, all things having life, man, animals, plants, cling to it; the uncertainties of death are more dreaded than the certain ills of life. Then, too, life is existence, being; a dead thing is nothing, having no existence, no being.

Yet further, life feeds on death; life lives on death ; by the destruction of life alone is life sustained; were there no death, under the present economy of things, there could be no life, no continuing state of existence. Death is the grand and universal interatatice of life; the infant's first breath is the breath of the dying. The whole scheme of animated nature throughout the planet, concocted and put in running order by a so-called beneficent creator, involves the consum