Page:Through a Glass Lightly (1897, Greg).djvu/18

 idle thing. But Johnson speaks truth in the main; for to hack our retracing way through the impenetrable thicket of the years into that sweet and flowering meadowland of adolescence, where the wine was but an attribute of dessert, and it was among the dried cherries and the Elva plums that you looked for its essentials; to transport our big hulking bodies into that ineffable backward, when power was potentiality at best, and ignorance at worst was bliss; to do this, I say, is merely impossible. If be for Boys, and I neither admit it nor deny, then is that cellar closed. But to be Men is for all of us; so for Men is Port. I had said it is the sole and only drink; though many excellentcomparatively excellentfolk there be that give the palm to ginger beer. And yet, on maturer