But was I to stay away from it for such reason?
Wherever life ran free and great, there men drank.

Romance and Adventure seemed always to go down the street locked arm in arm with John Barleycorn.

To know the two, I must know the third.

Or else I must go back to my free library books and read of the deeds of other men and do no deeds of my own save slave for ten cents an hour at a machine in a cannery.
No; I was not to be deterred from this brave life on the water by the fact that the water-dwellers had queer and expensive desires for beer and wine and whisky.

What if their notions of happiness included the strange one of seeing me drink?
When they persisted in buying the stuff and thrusting it upon me, why, I would drink it.