Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/203

 attached to his foot, through the main streets of an Arizona town; the reveler grins and plucks feebly at the rope and says, 'Now, boys!' This picture is thirty years old. I see a driveling swaying figure in a crowd at a street corner in Los Angeles, trying to give away the contents of his pocketbook. I see a Vermont farmer in his haymow, surly and maudlin with the unfreezable alcoholic element of frozen apple-cider; he jabs his cow with the tines of his hayfork. Returning from a mountain camp at midnight to a Massachusetts village, I see in the road before me a dim mass reeling through the moonlight and entering a cottage in the outskirts, and two minutes later I hear a woman's voice shrieking, 'Murder! murder! murder!

"Yes," yawned His Excellency, "I have always insisted that the peasantry and the proletariat were nasty in their liquor—serves them right to lose it."

"Don't interrupt my vision," I said. "The shapes arise. I see in a New England city a trolley car full of sick college students scrambling for the rear platform—one of them lies at full length in the passage; he is a little trampled. I see a fellow student regularly soaking his shredded-wheat biscuit in whiskey; he carries his flask to morning