k and eggs, or anything, for
thirty-five cents.

Our town up home is a peach of a little town, anyway.

Say, I just feel as if I'd like to take my satchel and jump clean out of
that window. It would be a good rebuke to them.

But, pshaw! what would _they_ care?

XII. This Strenuous Age

Something is happening, I regret to find, to the world in which we used
to live. The poor old thing is being "speeded up." There is "efficiency"
in the air. Offices open at eight o'clock. Millionaires lunch on a baked
apple. Bankers eat practically nothing. A college president has declared
that there are more foot pounds of energy in a glass of peptonized
milk than in--something else, I forget what. All this is very fine. Yet
somehow I feel out of it.

My friends are failing me. They won't sit up after midnight. They
have taken to sleeping out of doors, on porches and pergolas. Some, I
understand, merely roost on plain wooden bars. They rise early. They
take deep breathing. They bathe in ice water. They are no good.

This change I am sure, is excellent. It is, I am certain, just as it
ought to be. I am merely saying, quietly and humbly, that I am not in
it. I am being left behind. Take, for example, the case of alcohol.
That, at least, is what it is called now. There were days when we called
it Bourbon whisky and Tom Gin, and when the very name of it breathed
romance. That time is past.

The poor stuff is now called alcohol, and none so low that he has a good
word for it. Quite right, I am certain. I don't defend it. Alcohol,
they are saying to-day, if taken in sufficient quantities, tears all the
outer coating off the diaphragm. It leaves the epigastric tissue, so I
am informed, a useless wreck.

This I don't deny. It gets, they tell me, into the brain. I don't
dispute it. It turns the prosencephalon into mere punk. I know it. I've
felt it doing it. They tell me--and I believe it--that after even
one glass of alcohol, or shall we say Scotch whisky and soda, a man's
working power is lowered by twenty per cent. This is a dreadful thing.
After three glasses, so it is held, his capacity for sustained rigid
thought is cut in two. And after about six glasses the man's working
power is reduced by at least a hundred per cent. He merely sits
there--in his arm-chair, at his club let us say--with all power,
even all _desire_ to work gone out of him, not thinking rigidly, not
sustaining his thought, a mere shapeless chunk of genial