e water with my skin soothed me like cool
linen.

And then John Barleycorn played me his maniacal trick. Some maundering
fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me. I had never been
morbid. Thoughts of suicide had never entered my head. And now that
they entered, I thought it fine, a splendid culminating, a perfect
rounding off of my short but exciting career. I, who had never known
girl's love, nor woman's love, nor the love of children; who had never
played in the wide joy-fields of art, nor climbed the star-cool heights
of philosophy, nor seen with my eyes more than a pin-point's surface of
the gorgeous world; I decided that this was all, that I had seen all,
lived all, been all, that was worth while, and that now was the time to
cease. This was the trick of John Barleycorn, laying me by the heels of
my imagination and in a drug-dream dragging me to death.

Oh, he was convincing. I had really experienced all of life, and it
didn't amount to much. The swinish drunkenness in which I had lived for
months (this was accompanied by the sense of degradation and the old
feeling of conviction of sin) was the last and best, and I could see for
myself what it was worth. There were all the broken-down old bums and
loafers I had bought drinks for. That was what remained of life. Did I
want to become like them? A thousand times no; and I wept tears of sweet
sadness over my glorious youth going out with the tide. (And who has not
seen the weeping drunk, the melancholic drunk? They are to be found in
all the bar-rooms, if they can find no other listener telling their
sorrows to the barkeeper, who is paid to listen.)

The water was delicious. It was a man's way to die. John Barleycorn
changed the tune he played in my drink-maddened brain. Away with tears
and regret. It was a hero's death, and by the hero's own hand and will.
So I struck up my death-chant and was singing it lustily, when the gurgle
and splash of the current-riffles in my ears reminded me of my more
immediate situation.

Below the town of Benicia, where the Solano wharf projects, the Straits
widen out into what bay-farers call the "Bight of Turner's Shipyard." I
was in the shore-tide that swept under the Solano wharf and on into the
bight. I knew of old the power of the suck which developed when the tide
swung around the end of Dead Man's Island and drove straight for the
wharf. I didn't want to go through those piles. It wouldn't be ni