United States or Finland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


James in association with Tennessee and Partner over a board supplied with hog, flapjack and forty-rod awakes a bewildering pity in the mind. An hour of Colonel Starbottle would soil him for a week. He is not made for such contact. It is both curious and instructive to notice how the too-cultured sensitiveness of a man of genius has blinded him to the greatest truth in the human life about him.

It is delicious and refreshing, and only slightly intoxicating. Allowed to ferment and become sour, it is all gall. Its drinking then is divided into two episodes swallowing and intoxication. There is no interval. "Forty-rod" whiskey is mild compared to it. I had seen the preparation of namu, which is very simple.

Then they tucked the old man into a beautiful room, which was the spare room, and in the night some time he got powerful thirsty and clumb out on to the porch-roof and slid down a stanchion and traded his new coat for a jug of forty-rod, and clumb back again and had a good old time; and towards daylight he crawled out again, drunk as a fiddler, and rolled off the porch and broke his left arm in two places, and was most froze to death when somebody found him after sun-up.

He evidently had spent the evening in marching torchlight processions of forty-rod whisky down his throat, and at this particular time was decidedly and disreputably drunk. With a sly wink to the crowd, as much as to say, "We'll have some fun with this individual," Winchell assumed a solemn face, and in a ghostly voice said to one of the company: "The poor fellow we were speaking of is dead!"

An average twenty-wagon outfit, first and last, would bring him in somewheres about fifty dollars and besides he had forty-rod at four bits a glass. And outfits at that time were thicker'n spatter. We used all to go down sometimes to watch them come in. When they see that little canvas shack and that well, they begun to cheer up and move fast.

Thence, on my homeward way, I might visit that strange and filthy shed, earth-paved and walled with the cages of wild animals and birds, where at a ramshackle counter, amid the yells of monkeys, and a poignant atmosphere of menagerie, forty-rod whiskey was administered by a proprietor as dirty as his beasts.

The tragedy had not even the dignity of an event in this man's life. He shot Indians as he ate his dinner, plainly as a mere matter of course. Nor was he a brute, but a kindly, honest, good fellow, not in the least blood-thirsty. The poor Indians have rapidly melted away under the fervent heat of forty-rod whisky, rifles, and disease.

In winter we generally encountered a great deal of snow, and very cold air on the bleak and wind-swept desert of the Upper Arkansas, but we employees got used to that; only the passengers did any kicking. We had a way of managing them, however, when they got very obstreperous; all we had to do was to yell Indians! and that quieted them quicker than forty-rod whiskey does a man.

Those sharps had drawed the landscape clean. Some one found a dollar in a floor-crack in a saloon, and the barkeep' gave him a gallon of forty-rod for it, and used to keep it in a box for exhibition, and the crowd would get around it and paw it over and say: 'My! my! Whatever in the world is this extremely cu-roos coin?

There were two or three Indians staggering about the door; there was swearing and filthy talk inside; there was a pretentious tasting of this, that, and the other cask by a parcel of sots, who in their hearts would have preferred "forty-rod" whisky.