ed him away.
And then I knew nothing, though I learned afterward that Larry wound up
under the bridge and spent the night there.

When I came to, it was dark. I had been carried unconscious for four
miles and been put to bed. I was a sick child, and, despite the terrible
strain on my heart and tissues, I continually relapsed into the madness
of delirium. All the contents of the terrible and horrible in my child's
mind spilled out. The most frightful visions were realities to me. I
saw murders committed, and I was pursued by murderers. I screamed and
raved and fought. My sufferings were prodigious. Emerging from such
delirium, I would hear my mother's voice: "But the child's brain. He
will lose his reason." And sinking back into delirium, I would take the
idea with me and be immured in madhouses, and be beaten by keepers, and
surrounded by screeching lunatics.

One thing that had strongly impressed my young mind was the talk of my
elders about the dens of iniquity in San Francisco's Chinatown. In my
delirium I wandered deep beneath the ground through a thousand of these
dens, and behind locked doors of iron I suffered and died a thousand
deaths. And when I would come upon my father, seated at table in these
subterranean crypts, gambling with Chinese for great stakes of gold, all
my outrage gave vent in the vilest cursing. I would rise in bed,
struggling against the detaining hands, and curse my father till the
rafters rang. All the inconceivable filth a child running at large in a
primitive countryside may hear men utter was mine; and though I had never
dared utter such oaths, they now poured from me, at the top of my lungs,
as I cursed my father sitting there underground and gambling with
long-haired, long-nailed Chinamen.

It is a wonder that I did not burst my heart or brain that night. A
seven-year-old child's arteries and nerve-centres are scarcely fitted to
endure the terrific paroxysms that convulsed me. No one slept in the
thin, frame farm-house that night when John Barleycorn had his will of
me. And Larry, under the bridge, had no delirium like mine. I am
confident that his sleep was stupefied and dreamless, and that he awoke
next day merely to heaviness and moroseness, and that if he lives to-day
he does not remember that night, so passing was it as an incident. But
my brain was seared for ever by that experience. Writing now, thirty
years afterward, every vision is as distinct, as sharp-cu