nd dreamed that I was drunk. Day
by day my appetite grew fiercer and more unbearable, until in my misery I
walked my floor hour after hour, unable to sleep, and feeling that if I lay
down I should die. One night, about a week before I yielded, I walked my
room until midnight, suffering the torments of hell. I felt that I was
dying, and rushed out of my room and walked and ran across fields and
through the woods, panting and gasping for breath. I felt that my head was
bursting to pieces. My blood boiled, and hissed, and foamed through my
veins. I could feel my heart throb and beat as though it would burst out of
my body. At that time I would have torn the veins of my arms open, if I
could have drawn whisky from them. When light came, I found that I had
walked and run seven miles since leaving my room at midnight. All that day
I was burning up for liquor. Had I been where I could lay my hands on it, a
thousand times that day I would have drank though it steeped my soul in
rivers of death.

In just this condition I went to Indianapolis to address the Woman's
Temperance Convention. I felt that I would drop dead before I finished my
speech. That night I did not sleep more than an hour, and that was a
miserable hour of sleep, in which I dreamed that I was drunk. I woke up
with a burning thirst, and sharp pains darting through my brain. The very
least noise would send a new pang to my head, and when I attempted to walk,
my own footsteps would jar upon my brain as though knives were driven
through it. The next day and night I fought it like a tiger, but my thirst
only increased, and then one gets tired at last of fighting an enemy all
day, knowing that he must confront that same enemy the next day, and the
next, for one can not live always on a strain, always in fear, and doubt,
and dread. The next day I started for Richmond, where I had business,
intending to go from there to Cincinnati and Covington, and thence East. I
got to Richmond, haunted, every inch of the road, with an inexpressible
longing for stimulants. When I got there, I knew that I was where I could
get a little rest from my intense suffering, for I could get whisky. When
the thought of what would be the result of touching it forced itself on my
mind, my agony was so terrible that I could feel the sweat streaming down
my face, and I could have wrung water from my hair.

If ever there was a man in ruins, a perfect spectacle of utter desolation,
I was that man, as