"For now I shall tell you what I had thought to say when your graduation drew nigh, had we been able to master mechanics and molecules and other mathematical rot as useful to a cavalry officer as a binocular to a blind man, and that I ought to have told you when you started out for yourself as a young _ranchero_, but could not bring myself to it so long as you seemed to have no inclination that way. Times, men, and customs have greatly changed in the last forty or fifty years, my boy, and greatly for the better. Looking back over my boyhood, I can recall no day when wine was not served on your grandfather's table. The brightest minds and bravest men in all Kentucky pledged each other day and night in the cup that sometimes cheers and ofttimes inebriates, and no public occasion was complete without champagne and whiskey in abundance, no personal or private transaction considered auspicious unless appropriately 'wet.' "Those were days when our statesmen revelled in sentiment and song, and drank and gambled with the fervor of the followers of the races. I was a boy of tender years then, and often, with my playmates, I was called from our merry games to join the gentlemen over their wine and drain a bumper to our glorious 'Harry of the West,' and before I went to the Point, Sandy, I knew the best, and possibly the worst, whiskeys made in Kentucky,--we _all_ did,--and the man or youth who could not stand his glass of liquor was looked upon as a milksop or pitied, and yet, after all, respected, as a 'singed cat,'--a fellow who owned that John Barleycorn was too much for him, and he did not dare a single round with him. "Then came the great war, and wars are always in one way demoralizing. West Point in the early sixties was utterly unlike the West Point of to-day, and no worse than a dozen of our greatest colleges. The corps still had its tales and traditions of the old time Fourth-of-July dinners at the mess hall, when everybody made a dash for the decanters and drank everything in sight. It was the only day in the year on which wine was served. It was in my time the invariable custom for the superintendent to receive the Board of Visitors on the day of their arrival at his quarters and to invite the officers and the graduating class to meet them, and to set forth, as for years had been the fashion at Washington, wine and punch in abundance, and the very officers detailed as our instructors would laughingly invite and challenge the youngsters so soon to shed the gray and wear the blue to drink with them again and again. I have seen dozens of the best and bravest of our fellows come reeling and shouting back to barracks, and a thoughtless set of boys laughing and applauding.