ars the more insistent, the clearer, the more alluring its
tones became.

And it followed him everywhere. At every board where he was a guest the
brimming cup stood beside his plate, at every turn of the street he was
buttonholed by some friend old or new, with the invitation to join him
in the "cup of kindness." At every evening party he found himself
surrounded by bevies of charming young Hebes, who, as innocent as angels
of any intention of doing him a wrong, implored him to propose them a
toast.

How could he refuse them? Especially when acquiescence meant escape from
this horrible, horrible soul-sickness, this weight that was bearing his
spirits down--crushing them.

Therein lay the tempter's power. Not in appetite--he was no swine to
swill for love of the draught. When he did yield he drained the cup
scarce tasting its contents. But ah, the freedom from the sickness that
tortured him, the weight that oppressed him! And ah, the exhilaration,
physical and mental, the delightful exhilaration which put melancholy to
flight, loosed his tongue and started the machinery of his brain--which
robbed the past of regret and made the present and the future rosy!

It was in the promise of this exhilaration that the seductiveness of the
dreaded tones lay.

Even his kindly old physician, diagnosing the pallor of his cheeks and
melancholy in his eyes as "a touch of malaria," added a note of
insistence to the voice, as he prescribed that panacea of the day, "a
mint julep before breakfast."

Yet he still sternly and stoutly turned a deaf ear to the voice of the
charmer, while dejection drew him deeper and deeper into its depths
until one day he found he could not write. His pen seemed suddenly to
have lost its power. He sat at his desk in the office of the _Messenger_
with paper before him, with pens and ink at hand, but his brain refused
to produce an idea, and for such vague half-thoughts as came to him, he
could find no words to give expression.

He was seized upon by terror.

Had his gift of the gods deserted him? Better death than life without
his gift! Without it the very ground under his feet seemed uncertain and
unsafe!

Then he fell. Driven to the wall, as it seemed to him, he took the only
road he saw that led, or seemed to lead, to deliverance. He yielded his
will to the voice of the tempter, he tasted the freedom, the
exhilaration, the wild joy that his imagination had pictured--drank deep
of it!

And then