Midnight has come, and though one or two of the weaker ones have already succumbed, and are lying prone upon the floor, still the song goes bravely on. And now is the landlord’s time to make his money. As a matter of business form or semblance, change must be returned after every treat has been paid for, and they are now all so “fou’” that not one of them can count straight. Perhaps out of a one-pound note ($4) given the landlord for a treat, only three shillings or so are returned; or out of three or four shillings handed him for the next treat, only a few pence are returned for change; and so the landlord dilutes his whiskey and keeps the cash, until daylight comes upon the bouters, when they disperse, with sore heads and stomachs, while the landlord has the money. This is a fair representation of an ordinary drinking bout of fifty years ago, as told me by those who then participated in them. And they were so common that one was usually going on at one of the hotels every night of the week--but, let us hope, excepting the Sabbath night. During the day these men were about their ordinary avocations, for even if they did drink, they worked. Were this fact not so, our country would not be what it is to-day, for downright hard work alone has made it. Those drinkers and midnight revellers were young, or not more than middle-aged men, and often lived fast lives. The consequence was that not one in a hundred of them lived to be sixty, and hardly one to any advanced age. It is usually supposed that delirium tremens can only be produced by long years of constant and excessive drinking; but authentic information comes to me of a widow woman who, about the period of which I write, began keeping hotel near the village of ----, and who had two or more sons, young men. These young men, strong and burly up to that time, now spent most of their time drinking. As soon as the effects of one glass of whiskey had in a measure passed off, they would ask their mother for more. “Indeed, you shall have all you want to drink, for you are your mammy’s own boys.” And this was said in the spirit of the greatest kindness. So the boys drank, and drank again, keeping themselves stupid from day to day. In six months those two boys, who had never before drank to any excess, had the delirium tremens and died. All this in six months! Allow me to here describe one of my most vivid boyish impressions of thirty-five years or so ago:--