On again recovering my health, I began to look about for something to do, and hearing of a vacant school east of Falmouth, and about four miles from my father’s, I made application and was employed to teach it.  It is with pride (which, after the record of so many failures, I trust will readily be pardoned) that I chronicle the fact that from the beginning to the end of the term I never tasted liquor.  I look back to those months as the happiest of my life.  I did what is seldom done, for in addition to keeping sober (which I believe most teachers do without an effort), I gave complete satisfaction to every parent, and pleased and made friends with every scholar (a thing, I believe, that most teachers do not do).  Very bright and vivid in memory are those days, made more radiant by contrast with the darkness and degradation which lie before and after them.  As I dwell upon them a ray of their calm light steals into my soul, and the faces of my loved scholars come out of the intervening darkness and smile upon me, until, for a brief moment, I forget my barred window, the mad-house, and my desolation, and fancy that I am again with them.  I boarded with Daniel Baker, and can never forget his own and his good wife’s kindness.

At the close of my school I was in better health and spirits than I had ever before been.  I began to feel that there was still a chance for me to redeem the losses of the past, and I can not describe how happy the thought made me.  I again began the practice of law, and for six months I devoted myself to my duties.  I had a large and paying practice, and not once but often was I engaged in cases where my fees amounted to from fifty to one hundred dollars, and once I received two hundred and fifty dollars.  I will further say that my clients felt that they were paying me little enough in each case, considering the service I rendered them.  But during the latter part of the time I suffered much from low spirits and nervousness, and my desire for whisky almost drove me wild at times.  I fought this appetite again and again with desperate determination, and how the contest would have finally ended I can not say had I not been taken down sick.  The physician who was sent for prescribed some brandy, and on his second visit he brought half of a pint of it, to be taken with other medicine in doses of one tablespoonful at intervals of two hours.  I followed his directions with care, so far as the first dose was concerned, but if the reader supposes that I waited two hours for another tablespoonful of that brandy he does my appetite gross injustice.  Neither would I have him suppose that I confined the second dose to a tablespoon.  I waited until my friends withdrew, making some excuse about wanting to be alone in order to get them to go out at once, and then I got out of bed and swallowed the remainder of that brandy at a gulp.  A desperate and uncontrollable desire for the poison had possession of me, and beneath it my resolutions were crushed and