ithout the whisky we could not have
passed the coal.

This strength John Barleycorn gives is not fictitious strength. It is
real strength. But it is manufactured out of the sources of strength,
and it must ultimately be paid for, and with interest. But what weary
human will look so far ahead? He takes this apparently miraculous
accession of strength at its face value. And many an overworked business
and professional man, as well as a harried common labourer, has travelled
John Barleycorn's death road because of this mistake.

CHAPTER XXXIII

I went to Australia to go into hospital and get tinkered up, after which
I planned to go on with the voyage. And during the long weeks I lay in
hospital, from the first day I never missed alcohol. I never thought
about it. I knew I should have it again when I was on my feet. But when
I regained my feet I was not cured of my major afflictions. Naaman's
silvery skin was still mine. The mysterious sun-sickness, which the
experts of Australia could not fathom, still ripped and tore my tissues.
Malaria still festered in me and put me on my back in shivering delirium
at the most unexpected moments, compelling me to cancel a double lecture
tour which had been arranged.

So I abandoned the Snark voyage and sought a cooler climate. The day I
came out of hospital I took up drinking again as a matter of course. I
drank wine at meals. I drank cocktails before meals. I drank Scotch
highballs when anybody I chanced to be with was drinking them. I was so
thoroughly the master of John Barleycorn I could take up with him or let
go of him whenever I pleased, just as I had done all my life.

After a time, for cooler climate, I went down to southermost Tasmania in
forty-three South. And I found myself in a place where there was nothing
to drink. It didn't mean anything. I didn't drink. It was no hardship.
I soaked in the cool air, rode horseback, and did my thousand words a day
save when the fever shock came in the morning.

And for fear that the idea may still lurk in some minds that my preceding
years of drinking were the cause of my disabilities, I here point out
that my Japanese cabin boy, Nakata, still with me, was rotten with fever,
as was Charmian, who in addition was in the slough of a tropical
neurasthenia that required several years of temperate climates to cure,
and that neither she nor Nakata drank or ever had drunk.

When I returned to Hobart Town, where d