For ten months from the time I quit drinking and began to lecture, I averaged one lecture a day.  I lived on the work and its excitement, making it take, as far as possible, the place of alcohol.  I learned too late that this was the very worst thing I could have done.  I was all the time expending the very strength I so much needed for the restoration of my shattered system.  For ten months, lacking two days, I fought my appetite for whisky day and night.  I waged a continued, never-ceasing, never-ending battle, with what earnestness and desire to conquer the God to whom I so fervently prayed all that time alone knows, and he alone knows the agony of my conflicts.  I dreamed that I was wildly drunk night after night, and I would rise from my bed in the morning more weary than when, tired and worn out from overwork, I sought rest.  The horror of such dreams can be known only to those who have experienced them.  The shock to my nervous system from a sudden and complete cessation of the use of all stimulating drinks was of itself a fearful thing to encounter.  I was often so nervous that, for nights at a time, I got little or no sleep.  The least noise would cause me to tremble with fear.  I suffered all the while more than any can ever know, save those who have gone through the same hell.  The manners and actions often induced by my sufferings and an abiding sense of my afflictions not infrequently militated against me.  It has often been said:  “He acts very strangely—­must have been drinking.”  Again:  “I believe he uses opium.”  These assertions may have been honestly made, but they were none the less utterly false.  If people could only know just how much the drunkard suffers; how sad, lonesome, gloomy and wretched he feels while trying to resist the accursed appetite which is destroying him, they would never taunt him with doubts, nor go to him, as I have had men, and even women, come to me (I say “men and women,” but they were neither men nor women, but libels on men and women), and say that this or that person had said that that or this person had heard some other person tell another person that he, she, or it believed that I, Luther Benson, had been drinking on such and such an occasion; or that some one told Mr. B., who told Miss X.T. that J.B. had said to Madam Z. that such and such a one had actually told T.Y. that O.M.U. had seen three men who had heard of four other men who said they could find two women who had overheard a man say that he had seen a man who had seen me with two men that had a bottle of something which he felt pretty sure was Robinson county whisky.  Therefore B. was drunk!