She somehow had got the idea that she was the queen emeritus of the May.

It was reported about town afterward that she tried to do the giant swing on the parlor chandelier.

But this was a gross exaggeration; she only tried to hang by her legs from it.
Reared, as I was, amid such surroundings and in a commonwealth abounding in distilleries, rectifying works, blending establishments, bottle-houses, barrel-houses, and saloons, I should have been a hopeless inebriate long before I came of age.

The literature of any total abstinence society would prove conclusively that I never had a chance to avoid filling a drunkard's grave.

Yet somehow I escaped the fate ordained for me.