r
die, on; could every young man feel these things as I am compelled to feel
and bear them, it seems to me that it would be enough to make them, while
they yet have the power to do it, dash the sparkling damnation to the earth
in all the pride of its mantling temptation.

At the very threshold of blooming manhood I found myself subject to all the
disadvantages which mankind, if they reflected upon them, would hesitate to
impose upon acknowledged guilt. In every human countenance I feared to find
an enemy. I shrank from the vigilance of human eyes. I dared not open my
heart to the best affections of our nature, for a drunkard is supposed to
have no love. I was shut up within my own desolation--a deserted, solitary
wretch in the midst of my species. I dared not look for the consolation of
friendship, for a drunkard is always the subject of suspicion and distrust,
and is not supposed to be possessed of those finer feelings that find men
as friends. Thus, instead of identifying myself with the joys and sorrows
of others, and exchanging the delicious gifts of confidential sympathy, I
was compelled to shrink back and listen to the horrid words, You are a
drunkard--words the very mention or thought of which has ten thousand times
carried despair to my heart, and made me gasp and pant for breath. Thus it
was at the very opening of life, and thus it ever has been, and thus it is
to-day. I have struggled, and with streaming eyes tried to wrench the
chains from my bruised and torn body. My weary and long-continued struggles
led to no termination. Termination! No! The lapse of time, that cures all
other things, but makes my case more desperate. For there is no rest for
me. Whithersoever I remove myself, this detestable, hated, sleepless,
never-tiring enemy is in my rear. What a dark, mysterious, unfeeling,
unrelenting tyrant! Is it come to this? When Nero and Caligula swayed the
Roman scepter, it was a fearful thing to offend the bloody rulers. The
Empire had already spread itself from climate to climate, and from sea to
sea. If their unhappy victim fled to the rising of the sun, where the
luminary of day seems to us first to ascend from the waves of the ocean,
the power of the tyrant was still behind him; if he withdrew to the west,
to Hesperian darkness and the shores of barbarian Thule, still he was not
safe from his gore-drenched foe. Rum! Whisky! Alcohol! Fiend! Monster!
Devil! Art thou the offspring in whom the lineaments of th