sing
that my system did not have time to work off the alcohol. As a result I
awoke with mouth parched and dry, with a slight heaviness of head, and
with a mild nervous palpitation in the stomach. In fact I did not feel
good. I was suffering from the morning sickness of the steady, heavy
drinker. What I needed was a pick-me-up, a bracer. Trust John
Barleycorn, once he has broken down a man's defences! So it was a drink
before breakfast to put me right for breakfast--the old poison of the
snake that has bitten one! Another custom begun at this time was that of
the pitcher of water by the bedside to furnish relief to my scorched and
sizzling membranes.

I achieved a condition in which my body was never free from alcohol. Nor
did I permit myself to be away from alcohol. If I travelled to
out-of-the-way places, I declined to run the risk of finding them dry. I
took a quart, or several quarts, along in my grip. In the past I had
been amazed by other men guilty of this practice. Now I did it myself
unblushingly. And when I got out with the fellows, I cast all rules by
the board. I drank when they drank, what they drank, and in the same way
they drank.

I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me. The
thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer. There was no time, in
all my waking time, that I didn't want a drink. I began to anticipate
the completion of my daily thousand words by taking a drink when only
five hundred words were written. It was not long until I prefaced the
beginning of the thousand words with a drink.

The gravity of this I realised too well. I made new rules. Resolutely I
would refrain from drinking until my work was done. But a new and most
diabolical complication arose. The work refused to be done without
drinking. It just couldn't be done. I had to drink in order to do it.
I was beginning to fight now. I had the craving at last, and it was
mastering me. I would sit at my desk and dally with pad and pen, but
words refused to flow. My brain could not think the proper thoughts
because continually it was obsessed with the one thought that across the
room in the liquor cabinet stood John Barleycorn. When, in despair, I
took my drink, at once my brain loosened up and began to roll off the
thousand words.

In my town house, in Oakland, I finished the stock of liquor and wilfully
refused to purchase more. It was no use, because, unfortunately, there
remaine