ir
abstinence and healthy toil. I drank every day, and whenever opportunity
offered I drank to excess; for I still laboured under the misconception
that the secret of John Barleycorn lay in drinking to bestiality and
unconsciousness. I became pretty thoroughly alcohol-soaked during this
period. I practically lived in saloons; became a bar-room loafer, and
worse.

And right here was John Barleycorn getting me in a more insidious though
no less deadly way than when he nearly sent me out with the tide. I had
a few months still to run before I was seventeen; I scorned the thought
of a steady job at anything; I felt myself a pretty tough individual in a
group of pretty tough men; and I drank because these men drank and
because I had to make good with them. I had never had a real boyhood,
and in this, my precocious manhood, I was very hard and woefully wise.
Though I had never known girl's love even, I had crawled through such
depths that I was convinced absolutely that I knew the last word about
love and life. And it wasn't a pretty knowledge. Without being
pessimistic, I was quite satisfied that life was a rather cheap and
ordinary affair.

You see, John Barleycorn was blunting me. The old stings and prods of
the spirit were no longer sharp. Curiosity was leaving me. What did it
matter what lay on the other side of the world? Men and women, without
doubt, very much like the men and women I knew; marrying and giving in
marriage and all the petty run of petty human concerns; and drinks, too.
But the other side of the world was a long way to go for a drink. I had
but to step to the corner and get all I wanted at Joe Vigy's. Johnny
Heinhold still ran the Last Chance. And there were saloons on all the
corners and between the corners.

The whispers from the back of life were growing dim as my mind and body
soddened. The old unrest was drowsy. I might as well rot and die here
in Oakland as anywhere else. And I should have so rotted and died, and
not in very long order either, at the pace John Barleycorn was leading
me, had the matter depended wholly on him. I was learning what it was to
have no appetite. I was learning what it was to get up shaky in the
morning, with a stomach that quivered, with fingers touched with palsy,
and to know the drinker's need for a stiff glass of whisky neat in order
to brace up. (Oh! John Barleycorn is a wizard dopester. Brain and body,
scorched and jangled and poisoned, return