rated in all friendliness.

I now made the old town of Benicia, on the Carquinez Straits, my
headquarters. In a cluster of fishermen's arks, moored in the tules on
the water-front, dwelt a congenial crowd of drinkers and vagabonds, and I
joined them. I had longer spells ashore, between fooling with salmon
fishing and making raids up and down bay and rivers as a deputy fish
patrolman, and I drank more and learned more about drinking. I held my
own with any one, drink for drink; and often drank more than my share to
show the strength of my manhood. When, on a morning, my unconscious
carcass was disentangled from the nets on the drying-frames, whither I
had stupidly, blindly crawled the night before; and when the water-front
talked it over with many a giggle and laugh and another drink, I was
proud indeed. It was an exploit.

And when I never drew a sober breath, on one stretch, for three solid
weeks, I was certain I had reached the top. Surely, in that direction,
one could go no farther. It was time for me to move on. For always,
drunk or sober, at the back of my consciousness something whispered that
this carousing and bay-adventuring was not all of life. This whisper was
my good fortune. I happened to be so made that I could hear it calling,
always calling, out and away over the world. It was not canniness on my
part. It was curiosity, desire to know, an unrest and a seeking for
things wonderful that I seemed somehow to have glimpsed or guessed. What
was this life for, I demanded, if this were all? No; there was something
more, away and beyond. (And, in relation to my much later development as
a drinker, this whisper, this promise of the things at the back of life,
must be noted, for it was destined to play a dire part in my more recent
wrestlings with John Barleycorn.)

But what gave immediacy to my decision to move on was a trick John
Barleycorn played me--a monstrous, incredible trick that showed abysses
of intoxication hitherto undreamed. At one o'clock in the morning, after
a prodigious drunk, I was tottering aboard a sloop at the end of the
wharf, intending to go to sleep. The tides sweep through Carquinez
Straits as in a mill-race, and the full ebb was on when I stumbled
overboard. There was nobody on the wharf, nobody on the sloop. I was
borne away by the current. I was not startled. I thought the
misadventure delightful. I was a good swimmer, and in my inflamed
condition the contact of th