At the warehouse a kind of understanding between myself and the Swedish teamsters, had already been achieved. When they returned with the empty trucks along the short street between our warehouse and the wharf they stopped at a saloon to have filled the tin pails for beer they carried on the trucks, and the athlete and myself had also provided ourselves with pails which they had filled for us. Aha! the athlete might boast of his prowess on the baseball field or at playing hockey in the winter, but I could outdrink him and in the eyes of the teamsters that made me the better man. How foolish the athlete! Had he declined to have anything to do with drink all might have been well with him, but as the ability to “carry your liquor” was an accepted standard among us he foolishly accepted it. On hot days and in the late afternoon the pails were sent frequently to the saloon and the athlete became worried. “Ah, let’s cut it out,” he said to me coaxingly and the teamsters laughed. “Why, Eddie, we haven’t had any at all yet,” they said; but he insisted, was compelled to insist. Already he staggered a little as he rolled the kegs out of the warehouse and now it was my turn to loiter with the teamsters while he worked. No more story-telling now. “I have a kind of headache to-day,” he said, while the teamsters and I drank six, eight, sometimes ten or twelve of the generous portions of strong beer, flauntingly. As the beer was paid for from a fund collected from all, we were drinking, in part at least, at the athlete’s expense. I drank and drank, enjoying the discomfiture of my fellow-worker, and something happened inside my head. My legs remained steady and I could roll the kegs more rapidly and accurately than ever--they became like corks and I fairly whirled them along the warehouse floor and down the incline and to the trucks--but at the same time all reality became strangely colored and overlaid with unreality inside myself. Beyond the roadway, in which the trucks stood, there was a vacant lot and this now became the centre of my attention. The vacant lot was in reality filled with rubbish, rusty tin cans, piles of dirt, broken wagon wheels and wornout household utensils, and among all this foul stuff dirty-faced children played and screamed; but now all this unsightliness was wiped off the surface of my vision. I talked to the teamsters and together we laughed at Eddie who kept scolding and saying apologetically that the beer we had been drinking was rotten stuff and gave him a headache, while all the time the most marvelous things took place in the vacant lot before my eyes.