“General Grant smokes!”
“President Grant drinks!”
These two sentences, with the lamentable fact of their probable truth, have made more smokers of young men in the military and civil walks of life than all other texts in the English language. General or President Grant is not responsible for the lack of brains in the community, to be sure; but if “great men” will persist in bad habits, young men should be taught the difference between them and their virtues, and cautioned to shun them, or their bark will be stranded far out of sight of their desired haven,—the port of their ambition,—and nothing but a worthless wreck remains to tell what better piloting might have done for them. The voyage ended cannot be re-commenced.
A student of medicine, in New York, brought a bottle of liquor to our room. I told him where that bottle would carry him.
“Pshaw! It’s only a pint of wine. Dr. Abernethy, the great English surgeon, bought one hundred and twenty-six gallons at once, and he did not die a drunkard,” was his contemptuous reply.
“But you must remember that Abernethy lived in the days of good port wine, when every man had something to say of the sample his hospitality produced of his popular beverage. The doctor, who never was intemperate, was very hospitable.
“‘Honest John Lloyd!’—what an anomaly when applied to a rum-seller—was a great wine merchant of London, a particular friend of Abernethy’s, and of all great men of his day, who loved wines and brandies.
“One day I went to Lloyd’s just as Dr. Abernethy left.
“‘Well,’ said Mr. Lloyd, ‘what a funny man your master is.’
“‘Who?’ said I.