.

But now he had inherited. He had changed. His hands trembled. His eyes
twitched. The corners of his mouth danced the dance of St. Vitus. He had
terrible nightmares, and awoke with parched mouth and with disagreeable
eyes, and with a rebellious head whose disorders required what he called
"an eye-opener" to cause them to abate.

His best friends took him apart and said: "Now really, old fellow, this
won't do. Its--playing the devil with you. Come now, knock off for a
bit. I'll bet you a hundred dollars you can't confine yourself to claret
for a month."

And Harland Slack would answer:

"Done! Have a cocktail?" He usually paid the bet before three hours were
up. The limitation, he said, was too strict.

"I'll give him two years," said his nearest intimate; "and then--" He
whistled The Dead March in Saul, and the fellows wagged their heads
ominously over the sad case--and their ale.

In short, Harland was not only addicted to drink, but he was given over
to it hand and soul. Yet he was very seldom drunk. He paused at that
excessively polite stage which was the surveyor's line of inebriety. An
eminent bar-keeper pointed him out one day and said:

"It isn't the boys that get drunk and then get over it, that go to the
devil so fast: it's the fellows that take a little all day long and keep
at it who can't be reformed."

So it naturally came about that while Harland Slack was in this
benevolent mood, which usually lasted from ten in the morning till one
in the morning, and which might aptly be described as betwixt Hell and
Earth, he became the common prey of common humanity.

His was not to reason why;
His was but to lend a fi'.
Theirs was but to take and sigh:
"I'll pay you sometime by and by."

He seemed to take it as a compliment that his purse was everybody's
bank, with a daily run on it. It was lucky for him that the enormous
principal left by his economical father could not be touched. But at
last, as it once in a while happens to the repleted, the unqualified
ability to borrow, or rather, in this instance, to steal, led to a pall.
Unlock every safe, unbar every vault, open up every store to pillage,
and the robber, glutted with desire, will disappear. On the same
principle, at the time of our historiette, Harland's friends, even his
bar-room acquaintances, were overtaken by a sentiment of self-reproach
or honor, and there was a general movement to swear off borrowing from
this man who ne