Even elderly ladies who looked with abhorrence upon the drinking habit were not denied their wee bit nippy.  They got it, never knowing that they got it.  Some of them stayed pleasantly corned year in and year out and supposed all the time they merely were enjoying good health.  For them stimulating tonics containing not in excess of sixty per cent of pure grain alcohol were provided by pious patent-medicine manufacturers in Chattanooga and Atlanta and Louisville—­earnest-minded, philanthropic patriots these were, who strongly advocated the closing-up of the Rum Hole, which was their commonest pet name for the corner saloon, but who viewed with a natural repugnance those provisions of the Pure Food Act requiring printed confession as to fluid contents upon the labels of their own goods.  It was no uncommon thing in the Sunny Southland to observe a staunch churchgoer who was an outspoken advocate of temperance rising up and giving three rousing hiccups for good old Dr. Bunkum’s Nerve Balm.  And distinctly I recall the occasion when a stalwart mother in Israel, starting off to attend a wedding and feeling the need of a little special toning-up beforehand, took three wineglassfuls of her favorite Blood Purifier instead of the customary one which she took before a meal; and, as a consequence, on her arrival at the scene of festivities was with difficulty dissuaded from snatching down the Southern smilax and other decorations that she might twine with them a wreath to crown herself.  She somehow had got the idea that she was the queen emeritus of the May.  It was reported about town afterward that she tried to do the giant swing on the parlor chandelier.  But this was a gross exaggeration; she only tried to hang by her legs from it.

Reared, as I was, amid such surroundings and in a commonwealth abounding in distilleries, rectifying works, blending establishments, bottle-houses, barrel-houses, and saloons, I should have been a hopeless inebriate long before I came of age.  The literature of any total abstinence society would prove conclusively that I never had a chance to avoid filling a drunkard’s grave.  Yet somehow I escaped the fate ordained for me.  As I say, I drank sparingly and for long periods not at all, until Prohibition came.  Then I began doing as about ninety per cent of my fellow-adult Americans began doing—­which was to take a drink when the opportunity offered.  As I diagnose it, we nearly all are actuated now by much the same instinct which causes a small boy to loot a jam closet.  He doesn’t particularly want all that jam but he takes the jam because it is summarily denied him and because he’s afraid he may never again get a whack at unlimited jam.