oldier on that ground. But he stood
firm. I must do him the justice to say that I now think it would not
have made any difference if he had done otherwise. He had tried the
other course many times.

"No. 4" must have heard me trying to help him, for one day, about a
month after that, he walked in on me quite sober, and looking somewhat
as he did the first day I saw him, thanked me for what I had done for
him; delivered one of the most impressive discourses on intemperance
that I ever heard; and asked me to try to help him get work. He was
willing to do anything, he said; that is, anything he could do. I got
him a place with a friend of mine which he kept a week, then got drunk.
We got hold of him, however, and sobered him up, and he escaped the
police and the justice's court. Being out of work, and very firm in
his resolution never to drink again, we lent him some money--a very
little--with which to keep along a few days, on which he got drunk
immediately, and did fall into the hands of the police, and was sent to
jail as before. This, in fact, was his regular round: into jail, out of
jail; a little spell of sobriety, "an accidental fall", which occurred
as soon as he could get a drop of liquor, and into jail again for
thirty or sixty days, according to the degree of resistance he gave the
police--who always, by their own account, simply tried to get him to go
home, and, by his, insulted him--and to the violence of the language he
applied to them. In this he excelled; for although as quiet as possible
when he was sober, when he was drunk he was a terror, so the police
said, and his resources of vituperation were cyclopedic. He possessed
in this particular department an eloquence which was incredible. His
blasphemy was vast, illimitable, infinite. He told me once that he could
not explain it; that when he was sober he abhorred profanity, and never
uttered an oath; when he was in liquor his brain took this turn, and
distilled blasphemy in volumes. He said that all of its energies were
quickened and concentrated in this direction, and then he took not only
pleasure, but pride in it.

He told me a good deal of his life. He had got very low at this time,
much lower than he had been when I first knew him. He recognized this
himself, and used to analyze and discuss himself in quite an impersonal
way. This was when he had come out of jail, and after having the liquor
"dried out" of him. In such a state he always referred to hi