and very clear on others. I felt guilty of sin, yet smarted with
a sense of injustice. It had not been my fault, yet I had done
wrong. But very clear was my resolution never to touch liquor
again. No mad dog was ever more afraid of water than was I of
alcohol.

Yet the point I am making is that this experience, terrible as it
was, could not in the end deter me from forming John Barleycorn's
cheek-by-jowl acquaintance. All about me, even then, were the
forces moving me toward him. In the first place, barring my
mother, ever extreme in her views, it seemed to me all the grown-
ups looked upon the affair with tolerant eyes. It was a joke,
something funny that had happened. There was no shame attached.
Even the lads and lassies giggled and snickered over their part in
the affair, narrating with gusto how Larry had jumped on my chest
and slept under the bridge, how So-and-So had slept out in the
sandhills that night, and what had happened to the other lad who
fell in the ditch. As I say, so far as I could see, there was no
shame anywhere. It had been something ticklishly, devilishly
fine--a bright and gorgeous episode in the monotony of life and
labour on that bleak, fog-girt coast.

The Irish ranchers twitted me good-naturedly on my exploit, and
patted me on the back until I felt that I had done something
heroic. Peter and Dominick and the other Italians were proud of
my drinking prowess. The face of morality was not set against
drinking. Besides, everybody drank. There was not a teetotaler
in the community. Even the teacher of our little country school,
a greying man of fifty, gave us vacations on the occasions when he
wrestled with John Barleycorn and was thrown. Thus there was no