In a few minutes it will be three years and a half since I have taken a drink. In six years, six months, and a few minutes it will be ten years. Then I shall begin to feel I have some standing among the chaps who have quit. Three years and a half seems quite a period of abstinence to me, but I am constantly running across men who have been on the wagon for five and ten and twelve and twenty years; and I know, when it comes to merely not taking any, I am a piker as yet. However, I have well-groun

Looking back at the old game from this hillock of abstinence—it is not an eminence like those occupied by the twelve and fifteen year boys—looking back at the old game from this slight elevation, it is perhaps excusable for a man who put in twenty years at the old game to set the old game off against the new game and make up a debit and credit account just for the fun of it. Just for the fun of it! My kind of drinking was always for the fun of it—for the fun that came with it and out of it and w

A scientist who has made a study of the subject told me, early in my water-wagoning, that it takes eighteen months for a man to get the alcohol entirely out of his system—provided, of course, he has been a reasonably consistent consumer of it for a period of years. I think that is correct. Of course he did not mean—nor do I—that the alcohol actually remains in one's system, but that the sub-acute effects remain—that the system is not entirely reorganized on the new basis before that time; that t

Owing to a worldwide acquaintance among men who drink my personal determination to quit still excites the patronizing inquiry, "Still on the wagon?" when I meet old friends. That used to make me angry, but it does not any more. I say, "Yes!" take my mineral water and pass on to other things. But the position of those who quit and go back to it, and seek to excuse the return by saying, "Oh, I only stopped to see whether I could. I found it was easy; so I began again!"—now is that not the sublimat

So I sloughed off a good many and a good many sloughed off me; and a working basis was secured. At first I tried to keep along with all the old crowd, but that was impossible in two ways. I never realized until after I was on the water-wagon what extremes in piffle I used to think was witty conversation, and they discovered speedily that my non-alcoholic communications fitted in neither with the spirit nor the spirits of the occasion. The crying need of the society of this country is a non-alcoh

I refused to take it seriously. It was in reality the most serious thing in the world; but that was inside. Outside it was a thing to josh, to laugh over, to stand chaffing about—I listened to interminable comments, all couched in the same form—but, nevertheless, a thing to be held to grimly and firmly. So I went along whenever I had a chance. After the ghosts ceased haunting and the desire had gone I found I could cheer up on skillfully absorbed mineral water. I am free to say that a good deal

And there is this great advantage: Your resources for the entertainment of yourself are vastly developed when you do not drink. When you do drink, about all you do is drink—that is, the usual formula, day by day, is to get through work and then go somewhere where there are fellows of your kind and have a few. Now when you do not drink you find there are other things that occur to you as worth while. It is not necessary to hurry to the club or elsewhere to meet the crowd and listen to the newest

Take books—though books may not be a fair test of time employed in my case, for I always have read books in great numbers—but take books: In the past three years and a half I have read as many books—real books—as I read in the ten years preceding. I have read books I was always intending to read, but never got round to. I have kept up with the new good ones and have helped myself to several items of interesting discovery and knowledge that in the old days would have been known about only through

And let me say another thing: One of the reasons I quit was because I noticed I was going to funerals oftener than usual—funerals of friends who had been living the same sort of lives for theirs as I had been living for mine. They began dropping off with Bright's disease and other affections superinduced by alcohol; and I took stock of that feature of it rather earnestly. The funerals have not stopped. They have been more frequent in the past three years than in the three years preceding—all goo