[Illustration: “I threw open the flap and staggered about the table.”]
Although a total abstainer from spirituous liquors—for I can get as lively on cold water as any other man can on whiskey, I have to my credit or discredit, one single “drink.” It was on a railway train, going from Liverpool to London, that I was tempted; unlike Adam and many drunkards, I cannot say “the woman tempted me,” for it was a party of good fellows with whom I was traveling. As is generally known, European sleeping cars are divided into compartments—one for men and the other for women. Toward bedtime a flask of something stronger than water was passed—they called it “a nightcap”; all but I drank from it; I declined when invited, but when some one “dared” me to take a drink it was too much for my pride, so I yielded. There is a story of an Irishman who said to another,
“Well, have another. Ye can’t fly wid wan wing.”
I believed this assertion, for I was so exhausted by what I had swallowed that I soon made flying leaps from one berth to another and in other ways so conducted myself as to elicit shouts of laughter from the other men; our party became so noisy that the ladies in the next compartment got into a state of extreme indignation, rapped angrily on the wall, and sent the guard to us with frenzied appeals for silence. The effect of my physical condition was not so disastrous as that of my first cigar, but I caused as much disturbance as a man with a “load” which he should have made two trips for, and I was so grateful that matters were no worse that I resolved that my first drink should also be my last.
My first horse was another man’s. On the site of Hammerstein’s Theatre of Varieties used to be a stable, whose proprietor was so kind to me, when I was a New York schoolboy, that I used to spend much of my spare time there. He owned a little black mare which he allowed me to ride in Central Park. Her age and pedigree were unknown; some men said she had been in the Civil War; others dated her back to the Mexican War; she ought to have been in both for she was full of fighting blood, indicated by defiant waves of a little flag-like tail. I could not possibly fall off, for her back sloped into a natural cradle; her hips and shoulders would have made fine vantage points for wireless telegraphy. Her manner was distinguished by severe dignity, and her walk was slow and stately; nothing could urge her out of it, but occasionally of her own free will she would break into a decorous trot for two or three minutes. She was a capital illustration of Milton’s idea of the female will:—