m. I knew not what I did or said, and yet my actions
and words were cunningly contrived to deceive.

For the greater part of the fifteen days which followed I was as
unconscious of what I did or said as if I had been dead and buried in the
bottom of the sea. What I know of the time I have learned since from the
lips of others. The hideous, fiendish serpent of drunkenness possessed my
whole being. I felt him in every nerve, bone, sinew, fiber, and drop of
blood in my body. There were moments when a glimmer of reason came to me,
and with it a pang that shriveled my soul. During the period that I was
drinking I was in Rushville, after leaving Indianapolis, Falmouth and
Cambridge City. Of course, for the most part of the time, I knew not where
I was. As I think of it now, I know that I was in hell. My thirst for
whisky was positively maddening. I tried every means to quit, when
conscious of my existence: I voluntarily entered the calaboose more than
once, and was locked up, but the instant I got out, the madness caused me
to fly where liquor was. I drank it in enormous quantities, and smothered
without quenching the scorching, blazing fires of hell which were making
cinders and ashes of every hope and energy of my being. I made my bed among
serpents; I fed on flames and poison; I walked with demons and ghouls; all
unutterable and slimy monsters crawled around and over me; every breath
that I drew reeked with the odor of death; every beat of my fast-throbbing
heart sent the hissing, boiling blood through my veins, which returned and
froze about it. I have neither words nor images sufficiently horrible to
typify my condition. I became, for the time an abhorred object; the sex of
my sainted mother made a wide sweep to pass me by, and dear, little,
innocent children fled from me as from a monster. My soul was no longer my
own. The fiend Appetite had given it over, bound and helpless, to the fiend
Alcohol. I turned by bleared vision towards the vaulted skies, and cursed
them because they did not rain fire and brimstone down upon me and destroy
me. And yet, oh! how I dreaded to die! The grave opened before me, and a
million horrors were in its hollow and black chasm. The scalding tears I
shed gave me no relief; the cries I uttered were unheard; and every ear was
deaf to my pleadings. At times I thought of the asylum, and I would have
given worlds could I have retraced my steps, and slept once more securely
within its merciful and p