Drink Author:Vance Thompson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE MODERATE DRINKER You may have met this important person, the moderate drinker. In the discussion of the good and ill of alcohol, no one is mo... more »re conspicuous. A library of books has been written about him. He is the whetstone of every argument. There was never an old family physician who sang the praise of wine and abused the " unscientific twaddle" of the enemies of alcohol who could not tell you of an esteemed uncle who lived " to be within four months of a hundred " and " never drank less than a bottle of port every day of his life." That old gentleman is the famous moderate drinker. I have met him in many lands. Sometimes he is indeed old; usually he is young; but there is one extraordinary thing about him—always he is going downstairs. Always he is getting away from that idealstate of his; and, if you meet him to-morrow or the next month or the next year, he has ceased to be, in some appreciable degree, as moderate a drinker. This is not an assumption. It is a fact. I knew a learned old man in Scotland; 1 knew him for many years. With unfailing regularity he took his bottle a day—but it was a quart bottle of whisky. In the afternoon he used to jog round his estate on a safe pony; and when day faded out he would come into dinner and his third drink. One dined well in his house, and when the cloth was taken away the servants were called in—from stables, gardens and offices—and the old man read prayers. Then the bottle of whisky and a jug of water were set before him and, filling his glass, he began his moderate drinking. If he had a guest, he had another bottle for the guest—he stood for no poaching on his. So he drank. He had a rare fund of talk, for in his youth he had been a student and a traveler; and always he read books worth discussing. Hour after ho...« less