physically, but being of a strong, vigorous, and healthy constitution, I was almost completely restored by the following morning.  Of course I resolved and promised my father and mother that I would never again taste liquor.  For some time I faithfully kept my promise, and for weeks the very thought of liquor was revolting to me.  No one becomes a drunkard in a day or week.  Alcohol is a subtle poison, and it takes a long time for it to so undermine man’s system that he finds life almost intolerable unless stimulated by the hell-broth which must surely destroy him in the end, unless he closes his lips like a vise against it.  But for me, I never could drink, from my childhood, without coming under the influence of the accursed poison.  I never drank because I liked the taste of liquor, but because I liked the first effects of it.  I was never able to tell good liquor or rather pure alcohol—­for such a thing as good liquor has never been made—­from the worst, the meanest, manufactured from drugs.  The latter may be more speedy than pure alcohol, but either will destroy with fatal certainty and rapidity.  I drank, as I have said, for the effects, and in the first years of my drinking my first emotions were pleasurable.  It sent the blood rushing to the brain, and induced a succession of vivid and pleasing thoughts.  But invariably the depression that followed was in the same ratio down as the former was up, and after a time I lost that first pleasant, unnatural feeling, and drank only to satisfy an indescribable passion or craving.  At first the wine glass may sparkle and foam, but let it never be forgotten that within that sparkle and foam is concealed the glittering eye of the uncoiled adder.  It is the sparkle of a serpent’s skin, the foam of the froth of death.  Here I must confess that for the past five or six years I have not been able to attain one moment’s pleasure from drinking.  Every glass that I have touched has proven to be the Dead Sea’s fruit of ashes to my lips.  I drank wildly, insanely, and became oblivious for days and weeks together to all which was about me, and finally awoke to the horrors which I had sought to drown, but now intensified a thousand fold.  No man ever buried sorrow in drunkenness.  He can not bury it that way any more than Eugene Aram could bury the body of his victim with the weeds of the morass.  Whoever seeks solace in whisky will curse the hour which saw him commit a mistake so fatal.  Woe to him who looks for comfort in the intoxicating glass.  He will see instead the ghastly face of murdered hope, the distorted vision of a wasted life, his own bloated corpse.  The habit of drink after a time becomes more than a mere habit; the system comes to demand and crave liquor, it permeates and affects every part of the body until every function refuses to perform its part until it has been aroused to action by its accustomed stimulant.