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In a word, she became an habitual dram-drinker; and this practice exposed her to such communication as debauched her reason, and perverted her sense of decorum and propriety. She and her husband gave a loose to vulgar excess, in which they were enabled to indulge by the charity and interest of some friends, who obtained half-pay for the captain.
Keep the siller, lad yell hae need o't, I'se warrant ye, and I hae nane my claes is nae great things, and I get a blue gown every year, and as mony siller groats as the king, God bless him, is years auld you and I serve the same master, ye ken, Captain Taffril; there's rigging provided for and my meat and drink I get for the asking in my rounds, or, at an orra time, I can gang a day without it, for I make it a rule never to pay for nane; so that a' the siller I need is just to buy tobacco and sneeshin, and maybe a dram at a time in a cauld day, though I am nae dram-drinker to be a gaberlunzie; sae take back your gowd, and just gie me a lily-white shilling."
To add to them, touch them, read their names, gave him the sweet, secret feeling which comes to a man who rubs one hand against the other. Like a dram-drinker, Stephen drank in little doses of the feeling these coins gave him. They were his creative work, his history of the world.
Notwithstanding her emaciation, her features still retained something of a pleasing expression, and might have been termed beautiful, had it not been for that repulsive freshness of lip denoting the habitual dram-drinker; a freshness in her case rendered the more shocking from the almost livid hue of the rest of her complexion.
He is a dram-drinker; and the poison that he imbibes with New England rum is as fatal, and nearly as rapid in its destruction, as strikline. "Who is he; can you guess? do you give it up? He is that handsome officer, the Laird of Epaigwit as the Scotch would say, the general as we should call him, for we are liberal of titles, and the man that lives at Cowcumber Falls, as they say here.
He has lost the noble traits of the barbarian, without acquiring the redeeming graces of a civilized being; and, although a member of the Hawiian Temperance Society, is a most inveterate dram-drinker. *Accounts like these are sometimes copied into English and American journals.
He feared that he would be led on to betray himself and to betray Florence to throw himself at Julia's feet and sacrifice his honesty, in spite of all his resolutions to the contrary. He felt when there as the accustomed but repentant dram-drinker might feel, when, having resolved to abstain, he is called upon to sit with the full glass offered before his lips.
But the vile character of the liquor sold to them acts on an ill- fed, unwholesome body as a poisonous irritant. We are told that "the East End dram-drinker has developed a new taste; it is for fusil-oil. It has even been said that ripe old whisky ten years old, drank in equal quantities, would probably import a tone of sobriety to the densely- populated quarters of East London."
From such temptations as that the repentant dram-drinker knows that he must fly. But though he did not go after the fire-water of Bolton Street, neither was he able to satisfy himself with the cool fountain of Onslow Crescent. He was wretched at this time ill-satisfied with himself and others and was no fitting companion for Cecilia Burton. The world, he thought, had used him ill.
Yet his wide white beard, cherubic face, and sparkling spectacles, at the numberless dinners and congresses where they appeared, made it hard to believe, somehow, that he had ever been anything so morbid as either a dram-drinker or a Calvinist. He was, one felt, the most seriously merry of all the sons of men.
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