f life was so organised that I (and millions like me) was
lured and drawn and driven to the poison shops.

Wander with me through one mood of the myriad moods of sadness into which
one is plunged by John Barleycorn. I ride out over my beautiful ranch.
Between my legs is a beautiful horse. The air is wine. The grapes on a
score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame. Across Sonoma Mountain
wisps of sea fog are stealing. The afternoon sun smoulders in the drowsy
sky. I have everything to make me glad I am alive. I am filled with
dreams and mysteries. I am all sun and air and sparkle. I am vitalised,
organic. I move, I have the power of movement, I command movement of the
live thing I bestride. I am possessed with the pomps of being, and know
proud passions and inspirations. I have ten thousand august
connotations. I am a king in the kingdom of sense, and trample the face
of the uncomplaining dust....

And yet, with jaundiced eye I gaze upon all the beauty and wonder about
me, and with jaundiced brain consider the pitiful figure I cut in this
world that endured so long without me and that will again endure without
me. I remember the men who broke their hearts and their backs over this
stubborn soil that now belongs to me. As if anything imperishable could
belong to the perishable! These men passed. I, too, shall pass. These
men toiled, and cleared, and planted, gazed with aching eyes, while they
rested their labour-stiffened bodies on these same sunrises and sunsets,
at the autumn glory of the grape, and at the fog-wisps stealing across
the mountain. And they are gone. And I know that I, too, shall some
day, and soon, be gone.

Gone? I am going now. In my jaw are cunning artifices of the dentists
which replace the parts of me already gone. Never again will I have the
thumbs of my youth. Old fights and wrestlings have injured them
irreparably. That punch on the head of a man whose very name is
forgotten settled this thumb finally and for ever. A slip-grip at
catch-as-catch-can did for the other. My lean runner's stomach has
passed into the limbo of memory. The joints of the legs that bear me up
are not so adequate as they once were, when, in wild nights and days of
toil and frolic, I strained and snapped and ruptured them. Never again
can I swing dizzily aloft and trust all the proud quick that is I to a
single rope-clutch in the driving blackness of storm. Never again can I
run with the s