happened. Here life was always very live, and, sometimes, even
lurid, when blows were struck, and blood was shed, and big
policemen came shouldering in. Great moments, these, for me, my
head filled with all the wild and valiant fighting of the gallant
adventurers on sea and land. There were no big moments when I
trudged along the street throwing my papers in at doors. But in
the saloons, even the sots, stupefied, sprawling across the tables
or in the sawdust, were objects of mystery and wonder.

And more, the saloons were right. The city fathers sanctioned
them and licensed them. They were not the terrible places I heard
boys deem them who lacked my opportunities to know. Terrible they
might be, but then that only meant they were terribly wonderful,
and it is the terribly wonderful that a boy desires to know. In
the same way pirates, and shipwrecks, and battles were terrible;
and what healthy boy wouldn't give his immortal soul to
participate in such affairs?

Besides, in saloons I saw reporters, editors, lawyers, judges,
whose names and faces I knew. They put the seal of social
approval on the saloon. They verified my own feeling of
fascination in the saloon. They, too, must have found there that
something different, that something beyond, which I sensed and
groped after. What it was, I did not know; yet there it must be,
for there men focused like buzzing flies about a honey pot. I had
no sorrows, and the world was very bright, so I could not guess
that what these men sought was forgetfulness of jaded toil and
stale grief.

Not that I drank at that time. From ten to fifteen I rarely