honest manufacturer to meet it." * * * LOVE AS AN INTOXICANT? Seymour, Texas, Nov. 4, 1897. MR. BRANN: Will you please answer the following question and thereby settle a dispute in Seymour: Is love intoxicating? CHAS. E. RUPE. My correspondent neglects to state whether Seymour is a Prohibition town. Of course if it is and love is listed as an intoxicant, the blind god will be expatriated for the benefit of the makers of Peruna, Hostetter's Bitters and and other palate ticklers, popular only at blind tigers. Why the deuce didn't the Seymourites set to work and settle this vexatious problem for themselves? Must I undertake a system of scientific experiments in order to obtain this information for the citizens of Seymour? Suppose that I do so, find that love makes drunk come, and am run in by the patrol wagon while supercharged with the tender passion: don't you see that this would militate against my usefulness as a Baptist minister? How the hell could I explain to my congregation that I was full of love instead of licker? Clearly I cannot afford to offer myself as a sacrifice upon the altar of science. Should I proceed to fall in love just to see if it would go to my head, and should it do so, my Dulcina del Toboso might marry me before I recovered my mental equipoise, and I would awaken to find my liberty a has-been and my night-key non est. Of course I should mind it ever so little, but it would be awfully hard on the lady. I have been baptized just to see if it would soak out any original sin; I've gone up in a balloon and down in a coal mine in the interest of science; I've ridden on the pilot of a locomotive for the sake of the sensation; I've permitted myself to be inoculated with the virus of Christian charity just to see if it would "take"; I've tampered with almost every known intoxicant, from the insidious mescal of the erstwhile Montezumas to the mountain nectar of Eastern Tennessee, but I draw the line at love. Will it intoxicate? Prithee, good sirs, I positively decline to experiment. However, if hearsay evidence be admissible I'm willing to take the stand. To the best of my knowledge and belief love will pick a man up quicker and throw him down harder than even the double-distilled brand of prohibition busthead. Like champagne at 2 a.m., it is good to look upon and pleasant to the palate; but at last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an able-bodied bumble-bee in a pair of blue-jean pants. Like alcoholism, love lies in wait for the young and unwary--approaches the victim so insidiously that ere he is aware of danger he's a gone sucker. The young man goeth forth in the early evening and his patent leathers. His coat-tail pockets bulge with caramels and his one silk handkerchief, perfumed with attar of roses, reposeth with studied negligence in his bosom. He saith unto himself, "I will sip the nectar of the blind deity but I will not become drunken, for verily I know when