ity, half hidden
in the blue smoke of his cigar.

Very dreadful, not a doubt. Alcohol is doomed; it is going it is gone.
Yet when I think of a hot Scotch on a winter evening, or a Tom Collins
on a summer morning, or a gin Rickey beside a tennis-court, or a stein
of beer on a bench beside a bowling-green--I wish somehow that we could
prohibit the use of alcohol and merely drink beer and whisky and gin as
we used to. But these things, it appears, interfere with work. They have
got to go.

But turn to the broader and simpler question of _work_ itself. In my
time one hated it. It was viewed as the natural enemy of man. Now the
world has fallen in love with it. My friends, I find, take their deep
breathing and their porch sleeping because it makes them work better.
They go for a week's vacation in Virginia not for its own sake, but
because they say they can work better when they get back. I know a
man who wears very loose boots because he can work better in them: and
another who wears only soft shirts because he can work better in a soft
shirt. There are plenty of men now who would wear dog-harness if they
thought they could work more in it. I know another man who walks away
out into the country every Sunday: not that he likes the country--he
wouldn't recognize a bumble bee if he saw it--but he claims that if he
walks on Sunday his head is as clear as a bell for work on Monday.

Against work itself, I say nothing. But I sometimes wonder if I stand
alone in this thing. Am I the _only_ person left who hates it?

Nor is work all. Take food. I admit, here and now, that the lunch I like
best--I mean for an ordinary plain lunch, not a party--is a beef steak
about one foot square and two inches thick. Can I work on it? No, I
can't, but I can work in spite of it. That is as much as one used to
ask, twenty-five years ago.

Yet now I find that all my friends boast ostentatiously about the meagre
lunch they eat. One tells me that he finds a glass of milk and a prune
is quite as much as he cares to take. Another says that a dry biscuit
and a glass of water is all that his brain will stand. One lunches
on the white of an egg. Another eats merely the yolk. I have only two
friends left who can eat a whole egg at a time.

I understand that the fear of these men is that if they eat more than
an egg or a biscuit they will feel heavy after lunch. Why they object
to feeling heavy, I do not know. Personally, I enjoy it. I like nothing
bet