John Barleycorn | Page 6

as I remember it, a lard pail, very wide across the top, and
without a cover. As I toddled along, the beer slopped over the rim upon
my legs. And as I toddled, I pondered. Beer was a very precious thing.
Come to think of it, it must be wonderfully good. Else why was I never
permitted to drink of it in the house? Other things kept from me by the
grown-ups I had found good. Then this, too, was good. Trust the
grown-ups. They knew. And, anyway, the pail was too full. I was
slopping it against my legs and spilling it on the ground. Why waste it?
And no one would know whether I had drunk or spilled it.
I was so small that, in order to negotiate the pail, I sat down and
gathered it into my lap. First I sipped the foam. I was disappointed. The
preciousness evaded me. Evidently it did not reside in the foam.
Besides, the taste was not good. Then I remembered seeing the
grown-ups blow the foam away before they drank. I buried my face in
the foam and lapped the solid liquid beneath. It wasn't good at all. But
still I drank. The grown- ups knew what they were about. Considering
my diminutiveness, the size of the pail in my lap, and my drinking out
of it my breath held and my face buried to the ears in foam, it was
rather difficult to estimate how much I drank. Also, I was gulping it
down like medicine, in nauseous haste to get the ordeal over.
I shuddered when I started on, and decided that the good taste would
come afterward. I tried several times more in the course of that long

half-mile. Then, astounded by the quantity of beer that was lacking, and
remembering having seen stale beer made to foam afresh, I took a stick
and stirred what was left till it foamed to the brim.
And my father never noticed. He emptied the pail with the wide thirst
of the sweating ploughman, returned it to me, and started up the plough.
I endeavoured to walk beside the horses. I remember tottering and
falling against their heels in front of the shining share, and that my
father hauled back on the lines so violently that the horses nearly sat
down on me. He told me afterward that it was by only a matter of
inches that I escaped disembowelling. Vaguely, too, I remember, my
father carried me in his arms to the trees on the edge of the field, while
all the world reeled and swung about me, and I was aware of deadly
nausea mingled with an appalling conviction of sin.
I slept the afternoon away under the trees, and when my father roused
me at sundown it was a very sick little boy that got up and dragged
wearily homeward. I was exhausted, oppressed by the weight of my
limbs, and in my stomach was a harp-like vibrating that extended to my
throat and brain. My condition was like that of one who had gone
through a battle with poison. In truth, I had been poisoned.
In the weeks and months that followed I had no more interest in beer
than in the kitchen stove after it had burned me. The grown- ups were
right. Beer was not for children. The grown-ups didn't mind it; but
neither did they mind taking pills and castor oil. As for me, I could
manage to get along quite well without beer. Yes, and to the day of my
death I could have managed to get along quite well without it. But
circumstance decreed otherwise. At every turn in the world in which I
lived, John Barleycorn beckoned. There was no escaping him. All paths
led to him. And it took twenty years of contact, of exchanging greetings
and passing on with my tongue in my cheek, to develop in me a
sneaking liking for the rascal.
CHAPTER IV
My next bout with John Barleycorn occurred when I was seven. This

time my imagination was at fault, and I was frightened into the
encounter. Still farming, my family had moved to a ranch on the bleak
sad coast of San Mateo County, south of San Francisco. It was a wild,
primitive countryside in those days; and often I heard my mother pride
herself that we were old American stock and not immigrant Irish and
Italians like our neighbours. In all our section there was only one other
old American family.
One Sunday morning found me, how or why I cannot now remember,
at the Morrisey ranch. A number of young people had gathered there
from the nearer ranches. Besides, the oldsters had been there, drinking
since early dawn, and, some of them, since