There are thousands of young musicians, young business men, young singers, young electricians--thousands and hundreds of thousands of human beings engaged in all kinds of effort in all directions. ALL OF THEM ARE DISCONTENTED. Those that have the right kind of discontent will go at least as far as their natural capacity can take them, and those that have the wrong kind will collapse, achieve nothing and devote wasted lives to wasting pity on themselves. ---- Try to acquire the discontent of Alexander, Carlyle, Pagallini, Taglioni, or even that of the honest bootblack who "shines them up" so hard that the perspiration comes through his check jumper in cold weather. WHAT THE BARTENDER SEES A young man with a cold face, much nervous energy and a tired-of-the-world expression leans over the polished, silver-mounted drinking bar. You look at him and order your drink. You know what you think of him, and you think you know what he thinks of you. Did you ever stop to think of ALL THE STRANGE HUMAN BEINGS besides yourself that pass before him? He stands there as a sentinel, business man, detective, waiter, general entertainer and host for the homeless. In comes a young man, rather early in the day. He is a little tired--up too late the night before. He takes a cocktail. He tells the bartender that he does not believe in cocktails. He never takes them, in fact. "The bitters in a cocktail will eat a hole through a thin handkerchief--pretty bad effect on your stomach, eh?" and so on. Out goes the young man with the cocktail inside of him. And the bartender KNOWS that that young man, with his fine reasonings and his belief in himself, is the confirmed drunkard of year after next. He has seen the beginning of many such cocktail philosophers, and the ending of the same. The way NOT to be a drunkard is never to taste spirits. The bartender knows that. But his customers do NOT know it. ---- At another hour of the day there comes in the older man. This one is the fresh-faced, YOUNG oldish man. He has small, gray side-whiskers. He shows several people--whom he does not know--his commutation ticket. He changes his mind suddenly from whiskey to lemonade. The bartender prepares the lemon slowly, and the man changes his mind back to whiskey. Then he tries to look more dignified than the two younger men with him. In the midst of the effort he begins to sing "The Heart Bowed Down with Weight of Woe," and he tells the bartender "that is from 'The Bohemian Girl.'" He sings many other selections, occasionally forgetting his dignity, and occasionally remembering that he is the head of a most respectable home--partly paid for. The wise man on the outside of the bar suggests that the oldish man will get into trouble. But the bartender says: "No; he will go home all right. But he won't sing all the way there. About the time he gets home he'll realize what money he has spent, and you would not like to be his wife."