o her failing limbs.

Rum is a dreadful knife whose edge is never red with blood, but which yet
severs throats from ear to ear. It assassinates the peace of families, it
cuts away honor from the family name, it lets out the vital spark of life,
and is followed by inconsolable death. It pierces hearts, and enters the
bosom of trust, goring it with gashes which God alone can heal. Rum is a
robber who is deaf to hungry children's cries and famished wives'
pleadings. He is a fell destroyer from whom peace and comfort and content
fly. No one can afford to be his subject, and it is the duty of every one
to rise in arms against him. Let him be cursed everywhere. Let anathemas be
hurled against him by the young and old of both sexes. Death is an angel of
mercy sometimes--this destroyer never. Death may open the gates of heaven
to every victim, but this destroyer can unbar alone the gates of hell. He
takes away concord and love and joy, and in their stead leaves the horror
and misery of pandemonium!

CHAPTER VII.

Blank, black night--Afloat--From place to place--No rest--Struggles--Giving
way--One gallon of whisky in twenty-four hours--Plowing corn--Husking
corn--My object--All in vain--Old before my time--A wild, oblivious
journey--Delirium tremens--The horrors of hell--The pains of the
damned--Heavenly hosts--My release--New tortures--Insane wanderings--In the
woods--At Mr. Hinchman's--Frozen feet--Drive to town in a buggy surrounded
by devils--Fears and sorrows--No rest.

From this time until I tried to break the terrible chain that bound me by
lecturing on the miseries and evils of intemperance, my life was one long,
hopeless, blank, black night. More than one half of the time for five years
I was dead to everything but my own despairing, helpless, pitiable and
despicable condition. I was afloat without provision, sail, or compass, on
an ocean of darkness, and from one period of deeper gloom to another I
expected to go down in the sightless oblivion and so end my accursed
existence. I could see no prospect of a rift in the curtain of pitchy cloud
which hung over me. I was myself an ever-shifting, restless, uneasy
tempest. My unrest and nervous dread of some swift approaching doom too
awful to be conceived became so intense and real that I fled from place to
place. Not unfrequently I came to myself during these epochs of madness
and found that I was a hundred or more miles from home, without friends,
respectable or