served up with a tragic accompaniment. A young female is stretched
incapable and asleep, sunk in all the degradation of dead drunkenness.
A man who is no longer master of himself is raising his tumbler,
with a tipsy desire to have it replenished. The apparition of King
Death, bony, frightful, and sinister, is grinning over the back of
the soddened tippler's chair, recruiting his legions from a fruitful
source; he is supplying the rummer of the drunken wretch from his own
vial, little more fatal than the fluid which is debasing and deadening
its victims around. A stout woman, also sinking into tipsy apathy,
is roused by the shock of finding the king of terrors added to the
company; she is thrown off her balance with a start, and, falling
backwards on the stone floor of the vault, she will probably break her
neck--as the artist's intention seems to hint--and furnish Death with
another customer.