Читать книгу The Last Chance: A Tale of the Golden West онлайн

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But, on the whole, Barrawong was an appointment which a gentleman with prejudices in favour of a quiet life would have found singularly unsuitable.

As for Jack, he fell in with the proposition warmly and loyally from its first mention. Distrustful, from past experience, of his will-power in the way of resistance in the grip of terrible drink temptation, to which, in the past, he had succumbed full many a time and oft, he was not ssss1 sorry to have the custody of the joint capital placed in safe hands. And yet nothing is a more astonishing psychical phenomenon than the unbroken abstention from alcohol which the intermittent drunkard will and can practise. Having so resolved, the whilom victim will sit with roystering comrades, whose full glasses pass before his face—lodge in hotels, where he sees (and smells) the soul-destroying liquid from morning to night, and under the fire of this temptation—over the grave of so many broken vows and tearful resolutions—he will remain as unshaken as a teetotaller in a coffee-house.