The Wine Cellar near Cincinnati.
XXXIV.
Keeping the Maine Law.
By the enduring perseverance of the lovers of cold water, laws have been passed in most of the Western States forbidding the sale of those beverages which make men rich, happy, dizzy, and drunk, all in the space of half an hour; so that now a good horn is not, as formerly, to be purchased at every corner grocery, and travellers are forced to carry a couple of "drunks" in a willow-covered flask in their overcoat pocket.
The usual "bitters" are not forthcoming in the morning, and old topers who have for years regularly paid their morning devotions to the decanter or the black bottle, must now perforce become votaries of the hydrant and the rain water barrel.
Not a few men have, within the last four months, drunk more water than for years before, to the great astonishment of their stomachs, which would, at first, almost rebel against the unusual visitor.
Many an habitual guzzler whose convivial habits have generally sent him to bed at five o'clock every afternoon, has been amazed to discover what a difference the new drink makes in the stability of the village constituents; and it will be a matter of wonder to find that at four in the afternoon the town is in comparatively the same situation it was in the morning; that the tavern sign is not over the shoe-maker's shop, nor the horse-trough in the front-parlor; that the pump is in the street instead of the church belfry, the confectioner's shop not in the livery stable, the livery horses not in the bakery, the bakery not a hardware store, the hardware store not full of shingles and building stuff; that the poplar-trees in front of the minister's house are right end up, and the flower-garden of the minister's wife is in a state of ordinary propriety, with no snow-balls growing on the strawberry vines, or strawberries on the lilacs; no blue-bells on the locust-trees, violets on the currant bushes, or lilies in the onion-beds; that there are no tulips on the pickets, and no moss-rose buds springing from the shed,—and that the boy who waters the stage-coach horses every afternoon as the clock strikes quarter to five, does not lead them tail first up the church lightning rod, and make them drink from the ridge-pole, as he had always thought.
In short he finds a serious and sudden change in the world around him, and that all the curious phenomena before mentioned and which formerly were always present in the afternoon to his confused vision, immediately after imbibing his seventeenth glass of rum and water, have ceased to occur, and that every thing is now right side up, and front end foremost to his ever before bewildered optics.
And not a few men who would be ashamed to own that they really care anything for the drop of spirits which they occasionally take for the "stomach's sake" will be seriously incommoded by this new stringency in temperance principles; and the deacon or elder who in the privacy of his closet kept a spiritual comforter of half pint dimension will miss, more seriously than he would like to own, even to himself, this pious dram.