"I'm a rigid 'temperance' man."
When we all smiled and glanced at the red and white wine glasses he had emptied in the course of the meal, he turned upon us savagely, saying:
"You smile derisively, but I repeat my assertion that I'm a strict 'temperance' man; I never take a drink unless I want it."
He paused, and then added:
"Temperance consists solely in never taking a drink unless you want it. Intemperance consists in taking drinks when some other fellow wants them."
Mr. Briggs's Generosity
He was peculiarly generous of encouragement to younger men, when he thought they deserved it. I may add that he was equally generous of rebuke under circumstances of an opposite kind. I had entered journalism without knowing the least thing about the profession, or trade—if that be the fitter name for it, as I sometimes think it is—and I had not been engaged in the work long enough to get over my modesty, when one day I wrote a paragraph of a score or two lines to correct an error into which the New York Tribune had that morning fallen. Not long before that time a certain swashbuckler, E. M. Yerger, of Jackson, Mississippi, had committed a homicide in the nature of a political assassination. The crime and the assassin's acquittal by reason of political influence had greatly excited the indignation of the entire North.
There lived at the same time in Memphis another and a very different E. M. Yerger, a judge whose learning, uprightness, and high personal character had made him deservedly one of the best loved and most honored jurists in the Southwest. At the time of which I now write, this Judge E. M. Yerger had died, and his funeral had been an extraordinary manifestation of popular esteem, affection, and profound sorrow.
The Tribune, misled by the identity of their names, had confounded the two men, and had that morning "improved the occasion" to hurl a deal of editorial thunder at the Southern people for thus honoring a fire-eating assassin.
By way of correcting the error I wrote and printed an editorial paragraph, setting forth the facts simply, and making no comments.