Lo 1 The Poor Toper

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 6, 11 February 1909, Page 209

Lo 1 The Poor Toper

Some of the American States have an emphatic way of dealing with tho topers who, like Artemus Ward, never allow business to interfere with " their drinking habits. They act upon an old principle-of -British law which allowed every dog one free bite—the overloaded toper was allowed to go free for just once, on signing a pledge against ' sperichus and fomented lickers.' At the next and subsequent offences the law hit him- at higlt velocity — somewhat as it does in Switzerland, where the life of the tippler and the loafer is made a burden to him until he reforms his ways. Our own" Habitual Inebriates Act (we are not quite sure of the title) offers the drunkard a deterrent dogree of loss of liberty, together with the chance of bracing up and reforming while an unwilling lodger upon the island of Pakatoa. We have heard of a sad topor — ' One part whisky, three parts mud, The kind that chews the devil's cud, And chews it to excess' — who ' swore off' permanently on seeing a tear " from" |he eye of his long-suffering -wife, fall-into the glass of be^r . which he had forced her to fill out for him. The Aye Maria quotes from the Madras Catholic Watchman the following story of ' a wife who had suffered all things at the hands of a drunken husband': ' When he became sober no one could convince him that he was a beast when drunk, and that his face was stamped with idiocy. So the wife took lessons in photography, and photographed him;, -taking one snapshot after another during the hours of, idiotic drunkenness. Grown sober, in one of his better" hour's the man received twenty photographs of himself taken in hours of debauchery. Then fear came upon the man; horror overwhelmed him; in utter disgust he revolted against himself. The sunshine had drawn his portrait in hideous lines. The public portrayal of himself, as he was when drunk, shocked the man into sobriety.' * The young, above all, who are wise will eschew alike the false joy and the metricious wit. that come of looking at the wine when it is red. Some years ago there appeared in the Boston Pilot a quatrain which is replete alike with wit and wisdom: ' He drank of wine that he might gain in wit, As do the fools who have small share of it; Another, with more wit, kept simpler fare, Having enough to know he'd none to spare.'