THE CIDER DRUNKARD'S APPETITE.
ONE of the most serious accusations against cider is that it creates an appetite for alcoholic drinks of every sort. One can hardly drink even sweet cider without wishing for more, and when it is drank right along from the barrel, as usual, the more it is drank the more it is wanted. Perhaps there is no other drink the fascination of which is so strong and lasting. Let us give a few proofs. Rev. William Thayer says that reformed drunkards testify that they nearly all formed the appetite on unfermented liquors, and drank nothing stronger till the appetite so educated demanded it. Then, and not till then, they went to the whisky shop. An agent of the Massachusetts Temperance Alliance, getting pledges in the secular schools, came to some towns where he got only about sixty per cent. of the scholars, two-thirds as many as he got elsewhere. He found that it was a common opinion there that fermented liquors do not form the drunkard's appetite. Several teachers told him that from four to eight scholars had come into their schools intoxicated, and some of them repeatedly, and nearly all on cider. A gentleman in Iowa writes of his own appetite for cider. It was formed by drinking one year to enable him to do heavy farm work. After that he worked where he could not get it, but more than a year he felt so great a craving for it that he would have given for it anything he possessed. And tho it is now four years since he drank cider, he has a great yearning for it and has to fight the appetite. In Pleasant Valley, N. Y., are some cider drunkards. One of them publicly said: “I am a cider drunkard. I am seventy years old. I am worth sixty thousand dollars. I would gladly give every dollar of it, and support my family by day's work, if I could get rid of this appetite for drink. I had fought it since my early manhood. Once I was victor for two years; at another time for six months; now drink is my master.” The falling tears, quivering lips, trembling hands and voice combined, were but a faint index of a struggling and, perhaps, lost soul.—The Christian Life.