llowing day:

APPALLING SUICIDE. PETER PUPKIN POISONED.

He perhaps hoped that the thing might lead to some kind of public
enquiry and that the question of Browning's poetry and whether it is
altogether fair to allow of its general circulation would be fully
ventilated in the newspapers.

Thinking of that, Pupkin came to the main corner.

On a warm August evening the drug store of Mariposa, as you know, is all
a blaze of lights. You can hear the hissing of the soda-water fountain
half a block away, and inside the store there are ever so many
people--boys and girls and old people too--all drinking sarsaparilla and
chocolate sundaes and lemon sours and foaming drinks that you take out
of long straws. There is such a laughing and a talking as you never
heard, and the girls are all in white and pink and cambridge blue, and
the soda fountain is of white marble with silver taps, and it hisses
and sputters, and Jim Eliot and his assistant wear white coats with red
geraniums in them, and it's just as gay as gay.

The foyer of the opera in Paris may be a fine sight, but I doubt if it
can compare with the inside of Eliot's drug store in Mariposa--for real
gaiety and joy of living.

This night the store was especially crowded because it was a Saturday
and that meant early closing for all the hotels, except, of course,
Smith's. So as the hotels were shut, the people were all in the drug
store, drinking like fishes. It just shows the folly of Local Option and
the Temperance Movement and all that. Why, if you shut the hotels you
simply drive the people to the soda fountains and there's more drinking
than ever, and not only of the men, too, but the girls and young boys
and children. I've seen little things of eight and nine that had to
be lifted up on the high stools at Eliot's drug store, drinking great
goblets of lemon soda, enough to burst them--brought there by their own
fathers, and why? Simply because the hotel bars were shut.

What's the use of thinking you can stop people drinking merely by
cutting off whiskey and brandy? The only effect is to drive them to
taking lemon sour and sarsaparilla and cherry pectoral and caroka
cordial and things they wouldn't have touched before. So in the long run
they drink more than ever. The point is that you can't prevent people
having a good time, no matter how hard you try. If they can't have it
with lager beer and brandy, they'll have it with plain soda and lemon
pop, and so the who