In the same way pirates, and shipwrecks, and battles were terrible; and what healthy boy wouldn't give his immortal soul to participate in such affairs?
Besides, in saloons I saw reporters, editors, lawyers, judges, whose names and faces I knew.

They put the seal of social approval on the saloon.

They verified my own feeling of fascination in the saloon.
They, too, must have found there that something different, that something beyond, which I sensed and groped after.

What it was, I did not know; yet there it must be, for there men focused like buzzing flies about a honey pot.

I had no sorrows, and the world was very bright, so I could not guess that what these men sought was forgetfulness of jaded toil and stale grief.
Not that I drank at that time.