Now I am one of those most unfortunate persons over whom alcohol has no appreciable authority. I confess this with shame and deep humiliation. Right in this Prohibition Era when various nondescript alcoholic beverages are held in higher esteem than ever before in our history (for does not the lowliest shellac now become a sacred and inviolate symbol of a personal liberty we would not recognize in this collectivist country if we saw it?) I can drink one, two or even three glasses of high voltage and yet remain placid, neutral, passionless, taciturn and erect in posture. So far as I am concerned even the dynamic and remorseless cocktail of these days is just so much ill-tasting liquid. Isn’t this tragic? But I would not prohibit the sale, ingurgitation or even the flagrant abuse of these curiously synthesized beverages, or even of good alcohol drinks. Not for one single prohibitive instant. For I want my coffee and some day some bluenose wowser might seek to deprive me of the cup that really cheers me. For I can arise in the morning hopeless, misanthropic, pessimistic, with a strong suicidal impulse, a feeling of uselessness and a Calvinistic conviction of sin--yet one cup of good coffee completely reverses my emotions and stirs me to optimism, confidence, cheer and incipient exaltation. I can be induced to consider new fur coats and parlor rugs. Or again, in the evening, I may have sunk into a mental stupor, becoming in fact so definitely subhuman that I can only listen to a radio or read a newspaper--but coffee at once changes the entire universe and suffuses me with self-satisfaction, energy, will power and complacency--jostles my brain cells rudely against each other and clicks out of them what little useful information there is in them. Indeed I strongly sympathize with any dull soul who momentarily sweeps aside the stagnant miasmas of toil, monotony and misery with a swig of ethyl alcohol--in varied disguise. Insensitive to alcohol I do exactly the same thing with caffeine. It is a most curious matter upon which to meditate. The entire universe is not something static and permanently postulated by definition. It is not even what I made it a moment ago. It is what coffee makes me and makes me make it at this moment. Leaving my entire environment, debts and all, and my complete mental and somatic equipment _in statu quo_ one dash of caffeine completely reorganizes the universe for me and as completely modifies my reaction thereto. The final test in any scientific experiment takes place when one variable factor accomplishes such results while all other factors remain completely unaltered. I know my coffee.