I suppose the trouble with me is lack of desire.  Prior to the attempted enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment potable and vatted mixtures had but small lure for my palate, or my stomach, or my temperament.  An occasional mild cocktail before a dinner, and perhaps twice a week a bottle of light beer or a glass of light wine with the dinner—­these, in those old wild wicked days which ended in January, 1920, practically made up the tally of my habitual flirtations with the accursed Demon.  In the springtime I might chamber an occasional mint julep, but this, really, was a sort of rite, a gesture of salute to the young green year.  Likewise at Christmas time I partook sparingly of the ceremonial and traditional egg-nog.  And once in a great while, on a bitter cold night in the winter, a hot apple toddy was not without its attractions.  But these indulgences about covered the situation, alcoholically speaking, so far as I was concerned.  For me the strong, heady vintages, whether still or sparkling, and the more potent distillations had mighty little appeal.  Champagne, to me, was about the poorest substitute for good well-water that had ever been proposed; and the Messrs. Haig & Haig never had to put on a night shift at the works on my account.

Yet I came from a mid-section of the republic where in the olden days Bourbon whiskey was regarded as a proper staff of life.  The town where I was born was one of the last towns below Mason & Dixon’s Line to stand out against the local option wave which had swept the smaller interior communities of America; and my native state of Kentucky was one of the two remaining states of the South, Louisiana being the other, which had not officially gone dry by legislative action up to the time when Br’er Volstead’s pleasant little act went over nationally.

While I was growing up, through boyhood, through my youth and on into manhood, I had the example of whiskey-drinking all about me.  Many of our oldest and most respected families owned and operated distilleries.  Some of them had been distillers for generations past; they were proud of the purity of their product.  Men of all stations in life drank freely and with no sense of shame in their drinking.  Mainly they took their’n straight or in toddies; in those parts, twenty years ago, the high-ball was looked upon with suspicion as a foreign error which had been imported by misguided individuals up North who didn’t know any better than to drown good liquor in charged water.  There were decanters on the sideboard; there were jimmy-johns in the cellar; and down at the place on the corner twenty standard varieties of bottled Bourbons and ryes were to be had at an exceedingly moderate price.  Bar-rail instep, which is a fallen arch reversed, was a common complaint among us.