nteresting
discovery and knowledge that in the old days would have been known about
only through newspaper reports. I have developed a good many half-facts
that were in my mind. I have classified and arranged a lot of scattering
information that had seeped into me notwithstanding my engagements with
the boys.

I have had time to go to see some pictures. I have had time to hear
some music. I have had time to visit a lot of interesting places, such
as great industrial concerns and factories, which I always intended to
see but never quite reached. I have had time to make a few
investigations on my own account. I have met and talked to a large
number of people who were formerly outside my range of vision. And I
have done better work in my own line--I have more time for it.

If I have lost any friends they were friends whose loss does not bother
me. I find that all the true-blue chaps, the worth-while ones, though
they look--in most instances--on my non-drinking idiosyncrasy with
amused tolerance, have not lost any respect or affection for me, and are
just as true blue as they formerly were. Most of them drink, but I fancy
some of them wish they did not; and none of them holds my strange
behavior up against me.

To be sure, they often have their little gatherings without me; but that
is not because they do not like me any the less, and is because I do not
happen, in my new role, to fit in. There are times, you know, when even
the most enthusiastic ginger-ale specialist is not _persona grata_. We
have reached a common basis of understanding. The real man is tolerant.
Intolerance is the vice of the narrow man.

Now, then, we come to the real question, which is: With our society
organized as it is, with men such men as they are, with conditions that
surround life as it is organized, with things as they stand to-day--is
it worth while to drink moderately, or is it not? The answer, based
solely on my own experience, is that it is not. Looking at the matter
from all its angles I am convinced that the best thing I ever did for
myself was to quit drinking. I will go further than that and say it is
my unalterable conviction that alcohol, in any form, as a beverage never
did anything for any man that he would not have been better without.

I can now sit back and contrast the old game with the new. The
comparisons fall under two general heads--physical and mental. The
physical gain is so obvious that even those who have not experi