HOW many ringing songs there are that celebrate the wine, and other goods behind the bar, as being wondrous fine! How many choruses exalt the brown October ale, which puts a fellow’s wits at fault, and lands him in the jail! A hundred poets wasted ink, and ruined good quill pens, describing all the joys of drink in gilded boozing kens. But all those joys are hollow fakes which wisdom can’t indorse; they’re soon converted into aches and sorrow and remorse. The man who drains the brimming glass in haunts of light and song, next morning knows that he’s an ass, with ears twelve inches long. An aching head, a pile of debts, a taste that’s green and stale, that’s what the merry fellow gets from brown October ale. Untimely graves and weeping wives and orphans shedding brine; this sort of thing the world derives from bright and sparkling wine. The prison cell, the scaffold near; such features may be blamed on wholesome keg and bottled beer, which made one city famed. Oh, sing of mud or axle grease, but chant no fairy tale, of that disturber of the peace, the brown October ale!