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 these tyrants are faithfully preserved?  Was the world, with all its climates, made in vain for thy helpless, unoffending victim?

To me the sun brings no return of day.  Day after day rolls on, and my state is immutable.  Existence is to me a scene of melancholy.  Every moment is a moment of anguish, with a trembling fear that the coming period will bring a severer fate.  We talk of the instruments of torture, but there is more torture in the lingering existence of a man that is in the iron clutches of a monster that has neither eyes, nor ears, nor bowels of compassion; a venomous enemy that can never be turned into a friend; a silent, sleepless foe, that shuts out from the light of day, and makes its victim the associate of those whom society has marked for her abhorrence; a slave loaded with fetters that no power can break; cut off from all that existence has to bestow; from all the high hopes so often conceived; from all the future excellence the soul so much desires to imagine.  No language can do justice to the indignant and soul-sickening loathing that these ideas excite.  A thousand times I have longed for death, and wished, with an expressible ardor, for an end to what I suffered.  A thousand times I have meditated suicide, and ruminated in my soul upon the different means of escaping from my load of existence.  A thousand times in wretched bitterness I have asked myself, What have I to do with life?  I have seen and felt enough to make me regard it with detestation.  Why should I wait the lingering process of an unfeeling tyrant that is slowly tearing me to pieces, and not dare so much as die but when and how the marble-hearted thing decrees?  Still, some inexplicable suggestion withheld my hand, and caused me to cling with desperate fondness to this shadow of existence, its mysterious attractions, and its hopeless prospects—­appetite, fiendish thirst, a burning, ever-crying demand for a poison that is death, and for which a man will give his body and soul as a sacrifice to whoever will satisfy his imperious cravings.  Let this appetite entwine itself about a man, let it throw its iron arms about his bruised body, and he will curse the day he was born.  But some one says, Why don’t you quit?  Just don’t drink!  In answer I would say, O God, give me poverty, shower upon me all the hardships of life, turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I be never again the victim of rum.  Suffer me to call life and the pursuit of life my own, free from the appetite for alcohol, and I am willing to hold them at the mercy of the elements, the hunger of beasts, or the revenge of cold-blooded men.  All of these, rather than the poison of the accursed cup.