discreditable undertaking that came beneath his notice. In retrospect
they pleased him--all and every one.

What he saw when he glanced at me appeared to please him also. At any
rate, it gave him the encouragement that one usually receives from an
attentive listener.

"Brutus, again a bottle. It is at the fourth bottle," he explained, "that
I am at my best. It is the fourth bottle, or perhaps the fifth, that
seems to free me from the restraints that old habits and early education
have wound about me. _In vino veritas_, my son, but the truth must be
measured in quarts for each individual. Some men I know might be drowned
in wine and still be hypocrites, so solidly are their heads placed upon
their shoulders. But my demands are modest, my son, just as modest as I
am a modest sinner."

He called to Brutus to toss more wood upon the fire, leaned back for a
while, holding his glass to the light of the flames, and turned to me
again with his cool, perfunctory smile.

"Strange, is it not, that men through all the ages have sought fools and
charlatans to tell their fortunes, when a little wine is clearer than the
most mystic ball of crystal. Before the bottle the priests of Egypt and
the Delphic oracle seem as faint, my son, as the echoes in a snail shell.
Palmistry and astrology--let us fling them into the whirlpool of vanity!
But give a man wine enough, and any observer can tell his possibilities.
A touch of it--and where are the barriers with which he has surrounded
himself? Another drop, and how futile are all the deceptions which he is
wont to practice upon others! In St. Kitts once I drank wine with a most
respectable merchant, a man who carried the Bible beside his snuff box,