“My dear Trotwood, do you know what it is to get out of whisky Christmas morning in a little one-horse Mississippi town where you have to put a darkey on a mule and wait until he rides five miles through the mud before you can get your Christmas toddy? Well, I hope you never may, for that thing happened to me last Christmas.
“The truth is, there was no need why we should have been out of the red ingredient of Christmas jollity, for when we turned in the night before we had a fine, big jug of it. But the Major was there, and the Colonel and the Doctor, and somehow, before we knew it, it was gone.
“I am a bachelor, you know, on a big Mississippi cotton farm, and these were my guests and we went to bed with our boots on. About daylight Christmas morning we all woke up with one impulse and an awful thirst.
“The Doctor got to the jug first, and we heard him growl:
“‘What infernal hog drank all this whisky last night?’
“This stirred up the Colonel, and he sat up in bed and remarked, with his usual emphasis:
“‘That licker gone a’ready? Christmas mornin’, too?’
“By this time we were all investigating it, and some of the talk indulged in concerning the man who did it ought to have made him feel anything but white.
“By this time we would have given a dollar each for a drink. The nearest whisky was five miles away, where Ikey Rosenstein, a little Mississippi Jew, kept a cross-roads grocery. It was raining, and cold, too, but there was nothing to do but to call Blue John and send him on old Kit, the pacing mule, for a new jug of it.
“‘Blue John,’ I said, when he poked his head in the door, ‘you’ll find my bridle and saddle hanging up in the carriage house. Saddle old Kit and take this jug up to old Ikey’s and bring it back full, p. d. q.’