Lifting my eyes to his, I saw that he was _drunk_! The horror and dismay of the discovery were inconceivable.
The rest of the interview, which was ended by his wife's appearance upon the scene to coax him off to his room, left an indelible impression upon my mind.

The Spartans had a way of "drenching" a helot with liquor, then parading him in his drunken antics before the boys of the town to disgust them with dram-drinking.

My object-lesson was the more striking because I had honored the inebriate.
The eloquent rector read the burial service over him ten years ago.
For over twenty years he had been a hopeless sot, beggared in fortune, wrecked in reputation--a by-word and a hissing in a town where he had once stood among the best and purest.

He outlived his son, who drank himself to death before he was thirty.
Another and later experience was in a fine old farm-house in the Middle States.

There had been a birthday celebration, and neighbors and friends gathered about a board laden with country dainties, and congratulated the worthy couple who presided over the feast upon the four stalwart sons who, with their wives and children, were settled upon and about an estate that had been for six generations in the family.