Fifteen Years in Hell | Page 9

me the mercy of
the infinite God!
That morning the family gathered about the breakfast table, but what a
shadow rested over all. A solemnity of silent sorrow was upon us. The
peace of yesterday had flown with my return home, and the dark misery
of my soul tinged with the shade of the grave's desolation the clouds
which were gathering in our sky. O, how often have I prayed that the
time might be given back, and that it might be in my power to resist the
curse; but the past is implacable as death, and I must bear the tortures
that belong to the memory of that most unhappy day. That day, and for
many succeeding ones, I read an anguish in the saintly face of my
mother that I had never seen there before. My father also bore about
with him a look of deep suffering which haunted me for years. For one
day I suffered intensely both mentally and physically, but being of a
strong, vigorous, and healthy constitution, I was almost completely
restored by the following morning. Of course I resolved and promised
my father and mother that I would never again taste liquor. For some
time I faithfully kept my promise, and for weeks the very thought of
liquor was revolting to me. No one becomes a drunkard in a day or
week. Alcohol is a subtle poison, and it takes a long time for it to so
undermine man's system that he finds life almost intolerable unless
stimulated by the hell-broth which must surely destroy him in the end,
unless he closes his lips like a vise against it. But for me, I never could
drink, from my childhood, without coming under the influence of the
accursed poison. I never drank because I liked the taste of liquor, but
because I liked the first effects of it. I was never able to tell good liquor
or rather pure alcohol--for such a thing as good liquor has never been

made--from the worst, the meanest, manufactured from drugs. The
latter may be more speedy than pure alcohol, but either will destroy
with fatal certainty and rapidity. I drank, as I have said, for the effects,
and in the first years of my drinking my first emotions were pleasurable.
It sent the blood rushing to the brain, and induced a succession of vivid
and pleasing thoughts. But invariably the depression that followed was
in the same ratio down as the former was up, and after a time I lost that
first pleasant, unnatural feeling, and drank only to satisfy an
indescribable passion or craving. At first the wine glass may sparkle
and foam, but let it never be forgotten that within that sparkle and foam
is concealed the glittering eye of the uncoiled adder. It is the sparkle of
a serpent's skin, the foam of the froth of death. Here I must confess that
for the past five or six years I have not been able to attain one moment's
pleasure from drinking. Every glass that I have touched has proven to
be the Dead Sea's fruit of ashes to my lips. I drank wildly, insanely, and
became oblivious for days and weeks together to all which was about
me, and finally awoke to the horrors which I had sought to drown, but
now intensified a thousand fold. No man ever buried sorrow in
drunkenness. He can not bury it that way any more than Eugene Aram
could bury the body of his victim with the weeds of the morass.
Whoever seeks solace in whisky will curse the hour which saw him
commit a mistake so fatal. Woe to him who looks for comfort in the
intoxicating glass. He will see instead the ghastly face of murdered
hope, the distorted vision of a wasted life, his own bloated corpse. The
habit of drink after a time becomes more than a mere habit; the system
comes to demand and crave liquor, it permeates and affects every part
of the body until every function refuses to perform its part until it has
been aroused to action by its accustomed stimulant.
The most hopeless and wretched slave on earth is he who has bound
himself with the fetters of alcohol, and it is a sad and lamentable truth
that among thousands very few ever escape from the soul-destroying,
health-ruining bondage of an appetite for intoxicating drink. There is
only one here and there of all the hosts that are enchained and cursed
who succeeds in breaking the bonds which bind body, soul and spirit.
So far as the prospect of success is concerned in winning men from evil,
I would say, let me go to the brazen-faced and foul-mouthed

blasphemer of the holy Master's name; let me go to the forger,