exceptional. I don't wish to hold up any raw head and bloody bones of
premature death and disgrace, and all that sort of thing, but I would
like to say this much to you: If you want to take a drink, take it and
go about your business, but don't associate together for the purpose
of drinking, whether for a night or for an hour. You will read, before
the long life that is before you ends, a hundred ways of accounting
for drunkards--heredity, inclination, regular drinking, grief,
disappointed love, and all that sort of thing, but all put together
they do not begin to approximate the cause I tell you of,--"associating
together." It is the associating together of boys, the late nights,
the early morning drinks, taken more frequently later on, and lastly
the appetite. It is the associating together for the purpose of drinking
that causes that selvage of bad company to adhere to the good company
you started out with earlier in the evening, and it is the selvage of
low company that will give every self-respecting man a good deal of
disagreeable reflection when he comes to look back at it. Don't buy
that sort of a ticket, my boy; the show won't pay you."

Speaking of veterans reminds me of something I would like to say right
here. Do you know there is nothing more awkward to a man--that is
nothing more awkward to me, and like all egotists I judge all by
myself--than meeting a familiar friend whom I have not seen for twenty
years. We expect each other to be the old heart-to-heart friends of
long ago, but how to go about re-establishing the relation is the
puzzle. We have all had new friends, new histories, new lives since
twenty years ago, and while we make an unsatisfactory attempt to be
the same "old boys" to each other, each feels the dismal failure.
Memory is faithful, but while we remember with affection that we were
Tom and Dick to each other then (twenty years ago) we cannot, out of
that slender material, build up a hearty fraternal conversation of