DRANK HARDER THAN EVER
to drown my chagrin. Even at this day, when I look back to that time, I experience a sense of humiliation and shame that makes me fear to look my fellow-man in the face. I never yet preached a temperance sermon to any man; perhaps because I feel I have no right to, but I say to you that I am firmly convinced that drink deadens everything that is best in man. Let a young man be distinguished for his domestic affections, for gratitude, for chivalry to woman, or any other noble quality, and then let him take to drink, and as sure as night succeeds day piece by piece these virtues will vanish from his character, and be succeeded by brutal indifference, selfishness, and weak wilfulness. During these years my family viewed my decadence with almost silent grief. My mother would sometimes gently remonstrate with me after I got very bad, but it appeared as if I could not stay myself. I frequently woke in the morning and found the clothing and boots, which I knew had been mud-bespattered almost beyond redemption in the debauch of the night before, brushed and tidied into respectability once more by my sisters’ loving hands. This touched me so that I determined to do better, but the resolutions were mighty sickly ones, and seldom outlived the day. I was six months out of employment, and during that time did nothing but waste my days in taverns, sulking about like a criminal until I got enough liquor in me to make me feel bold. Oh, when I think of that six months my blood boils. Sometimes I was away from home for two or three days at a time.