rated on breathing--on
breathing the air in the hugest lung-full gulps I could, pumping the
greatest amount of air into my lungs in the shortest possible time. It
was that or death, and I was a swimmer and diver, and I knew it; and in
the most intolerable agony of prolonged suffocation, during those moments
I was conscious, I faced the wind and the cinders and breathed for life.

All the rest is a blank. I came to the following evening, in a
water-front lodging-house. I was alone. No doctor had been called in.
And I might well have died there, for Nelson and the others, deeming me
merely "sleeping off my drunk," had let me lie there in a comatose
condition for seventeen hours. Many a man, as every doctor knows, has
died of the sudden impact of a quart or more of whisky. Usually one
reads of them so dying, strong drinkers, on account of a wager. But I
didn't know--then. And so I learned; and by no virtue nor prowess, but
simply through good fortune and constitution. Again my constitution had
triumphed over John Barleycorn. I had escaped from another death-pit,
dragged myself through another morass, and perilously acquired the
discretion that would enable me to drink wisely for many another year to
come.

Heavens! That was twenty years ago, and I am still very much and wisely
alive; and I have seen much, done much, lived much, in that intervening
score of years; and I shudder when I think how close a shave I ran, how
near I was to missing that splendid fifth of a century that has been
mine. And, oh, it wasn't John Barleycorn's fault that he didn't get me
that night of the Hancock Fire Brigade.

CHAPTER XV

It was during the early winter of 1892 that I resolved to go to sea. My
Hancock Fire Brigade experience was very little responsible for this. I
still drank and frequented saloons--practically lived in saloons. Whisky
was dangerous, in my opinion, but not wrong. Whisky was dangerous like
other dangerous things in the natural world. Men died of whisky; but
then, too, fishermen were capsized and drowned, hoboes fell under trains
and were cut to pieces. To cope with winds and waves, railroad trains,
and bar-rooms, one must use judgment. To get drunk after the manner of
men was all right, but one must do it with discretion. No more quarts of
whisky for me.

What really decided me to go to sea was that I had caught my first vision
of the death-road which John Barleycorn maintains for his devote