of twenty can start in the army with many a worse
handicap than a debt of honor and a determination to work it off.
That steadies him. That matter really gives me less care than you
thought for. It is the other--your giving way to an impulse to
drink--that fills me with concern. You come up like a man, admit
your fault, and say you deserve and expect my severe censure.
Well, I've thought it all over, Sandy. My heart and my arms go out
to you in your distress and humiliation, and--I have not one word
of reproach or blame to give you.

"For now I shall tell you what I had thought to say when your
graduation drew nigh, had we been able to master mechanics and
molecules and other mathematical rot as useful to a cavalry
officer as a binocular to a blind man, and that I ought to have
told you when you started out for yourself as a young _ranchero_,
but could not bring myself to it so long as you seemed to have no
inclination that way. Times, men, and customs have greatly changed
in the last forty or fifty years, my boy, and greatly for the
better. Looking back over my boyhood, I can recall no day when
wine was not served on your grandfather's table. The brightest
minds and bravest men in all Kentucky pledged each other day and
night in the cup that sometimes cheers and ofttimes inebriates,
and no public occasion was complete without champagne and whiskey
in abundance, no personal or private transaction considered
auspicious unless appropriately 'wet.'

"Those were days when our statesmen revelled in sentiment and
song, and drank and gambled with the fervor of the followers of
the races. I was a boy of tender years then, and often, with my
playmates, I was called from our merry games to join the gentlemen
over their wine and drain a bumper to our glorious 'Harry of the
West,' and before I went to the Point, Sandy, I knew the best, and
possibly the worst, whiskeys made in Kentucky,--we _all_ did,--and
the man or youth who could not stand his glass of liquor was
looked upon as a milksop or pitied, and yet, after all, respected,
as a 'singed cat,'--a fellow who owned that John Barleycorn was
too much for him, and he did not dare a single round with him.

"Then came the great war, and wars are always in one way
demoralizing. West Point in the early sixties was utterly unlike
the Wes