to a serpent--A world of devils--Flying in dread--I go to
Connersville, Indiana--My condition grows worse--Hell, horrors, and
torments--The horrid sights of a drunkard's madness.

Depraved and wretched is he who has practiced vice so long that he curses
it while he yet clings to it; who pursues it because he feels a terrible
power driving him on toward it, but, reaching it, knows that it will gnaw
his heart, and make him roll himself in the dust. Thus it has been, and
thus it is, with me. The deep, surging waters have gone over me. But out of
their awful, black depths, could I be heard, I would cry out to all who
have just set a foot in the perilous flood. For I am not one of those who,
if they themselves must die the death most terrible and appalling of all
others, would drag or even persuade one other soul to accompany them. But
as the oblivious waves are surging about me, and as I try to brave and
buffet them, I would cry to others not to come to me. When but just gasping
and throwing up my hand for the last time, it would not be to clutch, but,
if possible, to push back to safety. Could the youth who has just begun to
taste wine, and the young man his first drink--to whom it is as delicious
as the opening scenes of a visionary life, or the entering into some
newly-discovered paradise where scenes of undimmed glory burst upon his
vision--but see the end of all that, and what comes after, by looking into
my desolation, and be made to understand what a dark and dreary thing it is
for a man to be made to feel that he is going over a precipice with his
eyes wide open, with a will that has lost power to prevent it; could he see
my hot, fevered cheeks, bloodshot eyes, bloated face, swollen fingers,
bruised and wounded body; could he feel the body of the death out of which
I cry hourly, with feebler and feebler outcry, to be delivered; could he
know how a constant wail comes up and out from my bleeding heart, and begs
and pleads with a great agony to be delivered from this awful demon, drink;
could these truths but go home to the hearts and minds of the young men of
the land; could they feel for but one single moment what I am compelled to
live, and battle, and endure day in, and day out, until the days drag
themselves into weeks that seem like months, and months that seem like
years, striving all the time, a living, walking, talking death, and cares,
pleasures, and joys, all gone, yet compelled to endure and live, or rathe