him and laughing at him until the inevitable crash comes.  I once heard with a kind of chilled horror a narrative about a fine young man who had died of delirium tremens.  The narrator giggled so much that his story was often interrupted; but it ran thus—­“He was very shaky in the morning, and he began on brandy; he took about six before his hand was steady, and I saw him looking over his shoulder every now and again.  In the afternoon a lot of fellows came in, and he stood champagne like water to the whole gang.  At six o’clock I wanted him to have a cup of tea, but he said, ’I’ve had nothing but booze for three days.’  Then he got on to the floor, and said he was catching rats—­so we knew he’d got ’em on.[1] At night he came out and cleared the street with his sword-bayonet; and it’s a wonder he didn’t murder somebody.  It took two to hold him down all night, and he had his last fit at six in the morning.  Died screaming!” A burst of laughter hailed the climax, and then one appreciative friend remarked, “He was a fool—­I suppose he was drunk eleven months out of the last twelve.”  This was the epitaph of a bright young athlete who had been possessed of health, riches, and all fair prospects.  No one warned him; none of those who swilled expensive poisons for which he paid ever refused to accept his mad generosity; he was cheered down the road to the gulf by the inane plaudits of the lowest of men; and one who was evidently his companion in many a frantic drinking-bout could find nothing to say but “He was a fool!” At this moment there are thousands of youths in our great towns and cities who are leading the heartless, senseless, semi-delirious life of the bar, and every possible temptation is put in their way to draw them from home, from refinement, from high thoughts, from chaste and temperate modes of life.  Horrible it is to hear fine lads talking familiarly about the “jumpy” sensations which they feel in the morning.  The “jumps” are those involuntary twitchings which sometimes precede and sometimes accompany delirium tremens; the frightful twitching of the limbs is accompanied by a kind of depression that takes the very heart and courage out of a man; and yet no one who travels over these islands can avoid hearing jokes on the dismal subject made by boys who have hardly reached their twenty-fifth year.  The bar encourages levity, and the levity is unrelieved by any real gaiety—­it is the hysterical feigned merriment of lost souls.

[Footnote 1:  This is the elegant public-house mode of describing delirium tremens.]

There are bars of a quieter sort, and there are rooms where middle-aged topers meet, but these are, if possible, more repulsive than the clattering dens frequented by dissipated youths.  Stout staid-looking men—­fathers of families—­gather night after night to sodden themselves quietly, and they make believe that they are enjoying the pleasures of good-fellowship.  Curious it is to see how the fictitious assertion of