d in the bottom of the liquor cabinet a case of beer. In vain I
tried to write. Now beer is a poor substitute for strong waters:
besides, I didn't like beer, yet all I could think of was that beer so
singularly accessible in the bottom of the cabinet. Not until I had
drunk a pint of it did the words begin to reel off, and the thousand were
reeled off to the tune of numerous pints. The worst of it was that the
beer caused me severe heart-burn; but despite the discomfort I soon
finished off the case.

The liquor cabinet was now bare. I did not replenish it. By truly
heroic perseverance I finally forced myself to write the daily thousand
words without the spur of John Barleycorn. But all the time I wrote I
was keenly aware of the craving for a drink. And as soon as the
morning's work was done, I was out of the house and away down-town to get
my first drink. Merciful goodness!--if John Barleycorn could get such
sway over me, a non-alcoholic, what must be the sufferings of the true
alcoholic, battling against the organic demands of his chemistry while
those closest to him sympathise little, understand less, and despise and
deride him!

CHAPTER XXXV

But the freight has to be paid. John Barleycorn began to collect, and he
collected not so much from the body as from the mind. The old long
sickness, which had been purely an intellectual sickness, recrudesced.
The old ghosts, long laid, lifted their heads again. But they were
different and more deadly ghosts. The old ghosts, intellectual in their
inception, had been laid by a sane and normal logic. But now they were
raised by the White Logic of John Barleycorn, and John Barleycorn never
lays the ghosts of his raising. For this sickness of pessimism, caused
by drink, one must drink further in quest of the anodyne that John
Barleycorn promises but never delivers.

How to describe this White Logic to those who have never experienced it!
It is perhaps better first to state how impossible such a description is.
Take Hasheesh Land, for instance, the land of enormous extensions of time
and space. In past years I have made two memorable journeys into that
far land. My adventures there are seared in sharpest detail on my brain.
Yet I have tried vainly, with endless words, to describe any tiny
particular phase to persons who have not travelled there.

I use all the hyperbole of metaphor, and tell what centuries of time and
profounds of unthinkable agony and h