drinking

. . . we saw nothing in the way of searching planes or ships. . . . the second day out we organized little evening and morning prayer meetings. . . . Frankly and humbly we prayed for our deliverance. After the oranges were gone, we experienced terrific pangs of hunger, and we prayed for food. We had a couple of little fish lines with hooks about the size of the end of my little finger, but no bait. Were it not for the fact that I have seven witnesses, I wouldn't dare tell this story because it seems so fantastic. Within an hour after prayer meeting on the eighth day, a sea gull came out of nowhere and landed on my head. I reached up my hand very gently and got him. We wrung his head, feathered him, carved up his carcass and ate every bit, even the little bones. We distributed and used his innards for bait. Captain Cherry caught a little mackerel about six or eight inches long and I caught a little speckled sea bass about the same size, so we had food for a couple of days. . . . That night we ran into our first rainstorm. Usually you try to avoid a black squall, but in this case we made it our business to get into it and catch water for drinking. . . . Later we were able to catch more water and build up our supply. . . .

Surely, life is more than eating and drinking, more than buying and selling, more than getting and spending, more than the cultivation of the mind and a healthy body. It is the widening of our horizon, the broadening of our vision, the reaching out to eternal realities, the discipline of self until we can truly say, "I live, yet not I but Christ liveth in me."

I threw my cup away when I saw a child drinking from his hands at the trough.

POTABLE, n. Suitable for drinking. Water is said to be potable; indeed, some declare it our natural beverage, although even they find it palatable only when suffering from the recurrent disorder known as thirst, for which it is a medicine.

A little learning is a dang'rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.

There was an old Fellow of Trinity, A Doctor well versed in Divinity; But he took to free-thinking, And then to deep drinking, And so had to leave the vicinity.