esides in alcohol.

In the meantime, after this one relapse at Benicia, I went on with my
abstemiousness, primarily because I didn't want to drink. And next, I
was abstemious because my way led among books and students where no
drinking was. Had I been out on the adventure-path, I should as a matter
of course have been drinking. For that is the pity of the
adventure-path, which is one of John Barleycorn's favourite stamping
grounds.

I completed the first half of my freshman year, and in January of 1897
took up my courses for the second half. But the pressure from lack of
money, plus a conviction that the university was not giving me all that I
wanted in the time I could spare for it, forced me to leave. I was not
very disappointed. For two years I had studied, and in those two years,
what was far more valuable, I had done a prodigious amount of reading.
Then, too, my grammar had improved. It is true, I had not yet learned
that I must say "It is I"; but I no longer was guilty of a double
negative in writing, though still prone to that error in excited speech.

I decided immediately to embark on my career. I had four preferences:
first, music; second, poetry; third, the writing of philosophic,
economic, and political essays; and, fourth, and last, and least, fiction
writing. I resolutely cut out music as impossible, settled down in my
bedroom, and tackled my second, third, and fourth choices simultaneously.
Heavens, how I wrote! Never was there a creative fever such as mine from
which the patient escaped fatal results. The way I worked was enough to
soften my brain and send me to a mad-house. I wrote, I wrote
everything--ponderous essays, scientific and sociological short stories,
humorous verse, verse of all sorts from triolets and sonnets to blank
verse tragedy and elephantine epics in Spenserian stanzas. On occasion I
composed steadily, day after day, for fifteen hours a day. At times I
forgot to eat, or refused to tear myself away from my passionate
outpouring in order to eat.

And then there was the matter of typewriting. My brother-in-law owned a
machine which he used in the day-time. In the night I was free to use
it. That machine was a wonder. I could weep now as I recollect my
wrestlings with it. It must have been a first model in the year one of
the typewriter era. Its alphabet was all capitals. It was informed with
an evil spirit. It obeyed no known laws of physics, and overthrew the