store, drinking like fishes. It just shows the folly of Local Option
and the Temperance Movement and all that. Why, if you shut the hotels
you simply drive the people to the soda fountains and there's more
drinking than ever, and not only of the men, too, but the girls and
young boys and children. I've seen little things of eight and nine
that had to be lifted up on the high stools at Eliot's drug store,
drinking great goblets of lemon soda, enough to burst them--brought
there by their own fathers, and why? Simply because the hotel bars
were shut.

What's the use of thinking you can stop people drinking merely by
cutting off whiskey and brandy? The only effect is to drive them to
taking lemon sour and sarsaparilla and cherry pectoral and caroka
cordial and things they wouldn't have touched before. So in the long
run they drink more than ever. The point is that you can't prevent
people having a good time, no matter how hard you try. If they can't
have it with lager beer and brandy, they'll have it with plain soda
and lemon pop, and so the whole gloomy scheme of the temperance
people breaks down, anyway.

But I was only saying that Eliot's drug store in Mariposa on a
Saturday night is the gayest and brightest spot in the world.

And just imagine what a fool of a place to commit suicide in!

Just imagine going up to the soda-water fountain and asking for five
cents' worth of chloroform and soda! Well, you simply can't, that's
all.

That's the way Pupkin found it. You see, as soon as he came in,