accusation of doing something that it is just as impossible for me to do as it would be to live without breathing; that is, to take a drink of liquor without getting drunk.  And if there is any one thing that will make me hate a man—­loathe, abhor, and despise him—­it is to have him accuse me of drinking or using any kind of stimulants regularly and moderately.  I just want to say here, now, and for all time, that they who thus accuse me, lie in their teeth, mouth, throat, and away down deep in their dirty, cowardly, craven, black hearts.

I walked from the depot in Richmond—­or, rather, almost ran—­until I came to a drug store kept by a young man I have known for five or six years.  He keeps nearly all drugs in barrels, well watered, and drinks them regularly, and, as he calls it, moderately.  That is to say, he has not been sober for five years.  Always full, bloated, imbecile, idiotic—­has no idea of quiting himself, and would suffer as keenly as any brute is capable of suffering, at the thought of any one else who is in the habit of drinking becoming a sober man.  When I went in, he was leaning back in a chair dozing, dreaming, drunk, or as drunk as that kind of a man generally gets.  I asked him for whisky.  He straightened up, and a more fiendish gleam of joy than lit up his brutal face never sat upon the hideous countenance of a fiend fresh from hell.  He got up to get me the liquor, saying at the same time, “I will bet you five dollars you are drunk before night.”  I looked at him, saw the smile of joy, and the intense pleasure that my getting drunk was going to afford him.  Suffering, choking, and almost bereft of reason, as I was, his look and act caused me to hesitate and wonder what manner of man it was that was so utterly base and heartless as to rejoice at the ruin of one whose continued prayer is to live and die sober.  Then and there I prayed God to deliver me from such friends, and keep me from their accursed influence.  Hell knows no blacker deformity than that which would drag a fellow-creature again to degradation.  Satan was as much a friend of human happiness when he slimed into Eden.  In my very youth, I made a resolve that I never would, knowingly, stand in the path of any man and a better life:  that I would never do anything to prevent a man from leading a better life, and I have never broken that resolution.  I gathered strength and courage enough, by a desperate effort, to get out of the store without drinking, and started in an opposite direction from where anything was kept to drink.

I had gone but a short distance, when there was no longer any enduring of the torture.  I turned back and went into another drug store, and told the proprietor that I was sick, and asked him for whisky with some kind of medicine in it.  The man who gave it was not to blame, for he knew nothing about me, nor the fiendish thirst with which I was possessed; and while he was not more than a minute getting the liquor for me, it seemed an age, and when I took the