Pete hadn't been very well himself for several days. Sick in bed, he said, yesterday. He never used to be sick at all, "in the old days," he declared, no matter how much he had taken the day before. Never had a headache, or bad stomach, or anything like that. A little nervous, perhaps, yes. "But it's the kind of stuff we get nowadays," he thought. "There hasn't been time since prohibition started for the system to get trained to react to this TNT stuff, like it was to regular liquor. Maybe in ten years or in the next generation people's systems will have got adjusted to this kind of poison and it'll be all right with 'em." It's an interesting idea, I think. A customer was requesting Ed to "fix him up" a pint flask. No, it couldn't be done just now, as the supply was running too low for it to be passed out that much at a time. The disappointed customer tried to content himself with endeavoring to absorb as much of a pint as he could obtain through a rapidly consumed series of single drinks. And pretty soon it was officially announced from the bar that there would be "no more until nine o'clock in the morning." I gathered that the reserve stock was upstairs or downstairs and that the "old man" had gone away with the key. We went forth to take a walk, Pete accompanying us as a sort of cicerone, and discoursing with much erudition of bar-rooms as we went. "These places are getting scarce," he observed. "There don't seem to be any, or there seems to be hardly any of the old places uptown," I remarked. "Oh! no; not in residential neighborhoods," he replied; and I inferred that the law was, in deference to the innocent spirit of domesticity, keener-eyed there. "And there ain't but very few below the dead-line downtown," Pete said. They have, the bars, very largely disappeared from Broadway. Have been gone from that thoroughfare for some time. And in this thought we come upon one of the great mockeries of the situation which has existed since the Eighteenth Amendment went (more or less) into effect. What I mean is this: A great many people who had no ferocious opposition to the idea of a cocktail being drunk before a meal, or wine with it, or even a liqueur after it, did detest the saloon. It was the institution of the common, corner saloon, I fancy, at which the bulk of American temperance sentiment was directed. The perverse operation of prohibition then was this: It ceased to be possible (openly) to obtain any alcoholic beverage in anything like wholesome surroundings, in a first-class restaurant or hotel or in a gentleman's club. But in New York City, as is known to everybody who knows anything at all about the matter, the saloons, and particularly the lower class of saloons, have flourished as never before.