h the Noseless
One. His way leads to truth naked, and to death. He gives clear vision,
and muddy dreams. He is the enemy of life, and the teacher of wisdom
beyond life's wisdom. He is a red-handed killer, and he slays youth."

And Charmian looked at me, and I knew she wondered where I had got it.

I continued to talk. As I say, I was lighted up. In my brain every
thought was at home. Every thought, in its little cell, crouched
ready-dressed at the door, like prisoners at midnight a jail-break. And
every thought was a vision, bright-imaged, sharp-cut, unmistakable. My
brain was illuminated by the clear, white light of alcohol. John
Barleycorn was on a truth-telling rampage, giving away the choicest
secrets on himself. And I was his spokesman. There moved the multitudes
of memories of my past life, all orderly arranged like soldiers in some
vast review. It was mine to pick and choose. I was a lord of thought,
the master of my vocabulary and of the totality of my experience,
unerringly capable of selecting my data and building my exposition. For
so John Barleycorn tricks and lures, setting the maggots of intelligence
gnawing, whispering his fatal intuitions of truth, flinging purple
passages into the monotony of one's days.

I outlined my life to Charmian, and expounded the make-up of my
constitution. I was no hereditary alcoholic. I had been born with no
organic, chemical predisposition toward alcohol. In this matter I was
normal in my generation. Alcohol was an acquired taste. It had been
painfully acquired. Alcohol had been a dreadfully repugnant thing--more
nauseous than any physic. Even now I did not like the taste of it. I
drank it only for its "kick." And from the age of five to that of
twenty-five I had not learned to care for its kick. Twenty years of
unwilling apprenticeship had been required to make my system rebelliously
tolerant of alcohol, to make me, in the heart and the deeps of me,
desirous of alcohol.

I sketched my first contacts with alcohol, told of my first intoxications
and revulsions, and pointed out always the one thing that in the end had
won me over--namely, the accessibility of alcohol. Not only had it
always been accessible, but every interest of my developing life had
drawn me to it. A newsboy on the streets, a sailor, a miner, a wanderer
in far lands, always where men came together to exchange ideas, to laugh
and boast and dare, to relax, to forget the dull toil o