“‘Boss, whar—whar——’ stammered Blue John.
“‘Come in, Blue John!’ cried the Doctor, ‘come right in.’”
“‘Boss, whar de debbil you say you put dat bridle in de kerridge house? I been huntin’ fur it fur er hour an’ I can’t find it ter sabe my life.’”
A DRUNKEN WOMAN.
I saw in a neighboring city not long ago a drunken woman. She was in a fashionable hotel and stood beside a post in the little gallery that ran around the court. She was not three feet above our heads, was dressed in the height of fashion, wore a hat that looked like a huge poppy and altogether she was not unlike a beautiful tiger lily that seemed about to fall over into our arms. Instantly that wave of romance and reverence as natural to man, when he sees beauty clothed in purity, as the tides that do follow the midnight moon, swept over me. Her form was faultless, her gown perfect, her face beautiful.
At least I thought so until I looked up and happened to catch her eye. She smiled the sensual smile of a wood-nymph and leered as disgustingly as ever Bacchus through a glass of old Falerian. In a moment it all changed. Her face was no longer beautiful, but hard and cruel. Her form was made—her gown the gaudy thing of a demi-monde.
I blushed when she singled me out and leered, and ducked my head, for fear someone had seen me. But I soon saw that she leered at all alike and knew no difference between a man and men.
For a half hour she stood there, scarce able to cling to the post she stood by, the observed of every man in the court, the disgusting moral that pointed the old story of the fallen angel.
It is bad enough to see a drunken man. Nothing so quickly robs goodness of its sweetness, genius of its charm, greatness of its colossal form, than to behold it drunk. There are some great men I know who, if I ever saw them drunk, never again would I believe they were great. They say Poe was a drunkard. I cannot imagine it. And S. S. Prentiss—I cannot believe it. I cannot think of DeQuincy and Coleridge as opium eaters, Byron and Burns as whisky-heads. If I did I could never again read anything they wrote. For of all things that levels man to the beasts and makes knowledge a strumpet and genius a bawdy, it is the maudlin rottenness of a plain old drunk.
Whisky and not death is the greatest leveler with the dirt.