A cocktail, or several, before dinner, enabled me to laugh whole-heartedly at things which had long since ceased being laughable.

The cocktail was a prod, a spur, a kick, to my jaded mind and bored spirits.

It recrudesced the laughter and the song, and put a lilt into my own imagination so that I could laugh and sing and say foolish things with the liveliest of them, or platitudes with verve and intensity to the satisfaction of the pompous mediocre ones who knew no other way to talk.
A poor companion without a cocktail, I became a very good companion with one.

I achieved a false exhilaration, drugged myself to merriment.

And the thing began so imperceptibly that I, old intimate of John Barleycorn, never dreamed whither it was leading me.