Yet here I am, at the last, possessed with the drinker's desire.

It took twenty years to implant that desire; and for ten years more that desire has grown.

And the effect of satisfying that desire is anything but good.

Temperamentally I am wholesome-hearted and merry.

Yet when I walk with John Barleycorn I suffer all the damnation of intellectual pessimism.
"But," I hastened to add (I always hasten to add), "John Barleycorn must have his due.