Fifteen Years in Hell | Page 4

"Open wide and often to the criminals who
became my slaves before they committed crime." The evils of which I
speak are not unknown to you, but have you considered them as things
real? Have you fought them as present and near dangers? You have
heard the wild sounds of drunken revelry mingling with the night winds;
you have heard the shrieks and sobs, and seen the streaming, sunken
eyes of dying women; you have heard the unprotected and unfriended
orphans' cry echoed from a thousand blighted homes and squalid
tenements; you have seen the outcast family of the inebriate wandering
houseless upon the highways, or shivering on the streets; you have
shuddered at the sound of the maniac's scream upon the burdened air;
you have beheld the human form divine despoiled of every humanizing
attribute, transformed from an angel into a devil; you have seen virtue
crushed by vice; the bright eye lose its lustre, the lips their power of
articulation; you have seen what was clean become foul, what was
upright become crooked, what was high become low--man, first in the
order of created things, sunken to a level with brute beasts; and after all
these you have or may have said to yourself, "All this is the work of the
terrible demon, alcohol."
I shall not attempt to paint any of the countless scenes of degradation,
and horror, and misery, which this demon has caused to be enacted. I
shall leave without comment the endless train of crimes and vices, the
beggary and devastation following the course of this foul Titan devil of
ruin and damnation. I shall only endeavor to give a plain, truthful
history of one who has felt every pang, every sorrow, every agony,
every shame, every remorse, that the demon of drunkenness can inflict.
I have nothing to thank this demon for, beyond a few fleeting--oh, how
fleeting--hours of false delight. He has wrought only woe and loss to
me. Even now, as I sit here in the stillness of desperation, afraid of I
know not what, trembling with a strange dread of some impending
doom, gazing in fright backward along the shores of the years whereon
I see the wrecks of a thousand hopes, the destruction of every noble
aspiration, the ruin of every noble resolve, I cry aloud against the
utterness of the destroyer. My life has indeed been a sad one; so sad, so
lonely, that no language in my power of utterance can give to the reader
a full conception of its moonless darkness. Would that the magic pen of

a De Quincey were mine that my miseries might stand out until
strong-hearted men and true-hearted women would weep, and every
young man and maiden also would tremble and turn from everything
intoxicating as from the oblivion of eternal death.
To many, certain events which I shall relate in this history may seem
incredible; some of the escapes may seem improbable; but again let me
assure you that there shall not be one word of exaggeration. The
incidents took place just as I shall state them. I have passed through not
only all that you will find recorded in these pages, but ten thousand
times more. As I lift the dark veil and look back through the black,
unlighted past, I shudder and hold my breath as scene after scene, each
more appalling than the one just before it, rises like the phantom line of
Banquo's issue, defining itself with pitiless distinctness upon my seared
eyeballs, until the last and most awful of all stands tall and black by my
side, and whispers, hisses, shrieks Madness in my ears. I bow my head
and find a moment's relief from the anguish of soul in the hot scalding
tears which stream down my fevered cheeks. O God of sure mercy,
save other young men from the dark and desolate tortures which gnaw
at my heart, and press down upon my weary soul! They are all, all, all
the work of alcohol. Oh, how true it is--how true few can understand
until their lives are a burden of distress and agony to them--that the cup
which inebriates stingeth like an adder. When you see it, turn from it as
from a viper. Say to yourself as you turn to fly, "It stingeth like an
adder!"
CHAPTER II.
Birth, parentage, and early education--Early childhood--Early
events--Memory of them vivid--Bitter desolation--An active but uneasy
life--Breaking colts for amusement--Amount of sleep--Temperament
has much to do in the matter of drink--The author to blame for his
misspent life--Inheritances--The excellences of my father and
mother--The road to ruin not wilfully trodden--The people's
indifference to a great danger--My associates--What became of
them--The customs of twenty years ago--What might have been.

As to my birth, parentage and education, I am the