"So, Bub, when you think that by breathing on your coat sleeve to kill the whisky you can fool your pa, you are wrong. Your pa in his day ate three carloads of cardamon seeds and cloves and used listerine by the barrel. He knew which was the creaky step on the stairs in his father's house and used to avoid it coming in at night, just as you do now, and he knows just what you are doing. More than that, your pa speaks from the bitterest kind of experience when he pleads with you to quit. It is no goody-goody talk of a mutton-headed old deacon that he is giving you; it has taken him a year to get his courage up to speak to you, and every word that he speaks is boiled out of an agony of bitter memories. He knows where boys that start as you are starting end if they don't turn back. Your pa turned, but he recollects the career of the Blue boys, who are divided between the penitentiary, the poor-house and the southwest corner of hell; he recalls the Winklers--one dead, one a porter in a saloon in Peoria, one crazy; and he looks at you, and it seems to him that he must take you in his arms as he did when you were a little child in the prairie fire, and run to safety with you. And when he talks to you with his bashful, halting speech, you just sit there and grin, and cut his heart to its core, for he knows you do not understand.
"It's rather up to you, Bub. In the next few months you will have to decide whether or not you are going to hell. Of course the 'vilest sinner may return' at any point along the road--but to what? To shattered health; to a mother heart-broken in her grave; to a wife damned to all eternity by your thoughtless brutality; and to children who are always afraid to look up the alley, when they see a group of boys, for fear they may be teasing you--you, drunk and dirty, lying in the stable filth! To that you will 'return,' with your strength spent, and your sportive friends, gone to the devil before you, and your chance in life frittered away.
"Just sit down and figure it out, Bub. Of course there are a lot of good fellows on the road to hell; you will have a good time going; but you'll be a long time there. You'll dance and play cards and chase out nights, and soak your soul in the essence of don't-give-a-dam-tiveness, and you'll wonder, as you go up in the balloon, what fun there is in walking through this sober old earth. Friends--what are they? The love of humanity--what is it? Thoughtfulness to those about you? Gentility--What are these things? Letteroll--letteroll! But as you drop out of the balloon, the earth will look like a serious piece of landscape.