ound me; but this may be the
experience of others, only I think the melancholy, the fear, the
unhappiness which hung over me were not as marked in any one else. I
studied but little, because of my discontented and uneasy feeling, but I
kept up with my lessons, and have yet one or two prizes bestowed on me
twenty years ago for being at the head of my class the greater number of
times.

I recollect with painful clearness the first drink of liquor that ever
passed my lips. It has been more than twenty-four years since then, but my
memory calls it up as if it were only yesterday, with all the circumstances
under which I took it. It was in the time of threshing wheat, and then, as
in harvesting, log-rolling, and everything that required the cooperation of
neighbors, whisky was always more or less used. I was little more than six
years of age. A bottle containing liquor was set in the shadow of some
sheaves of wheat which stood near a wagon, and taking it I crawled under
the wagon with a neighbor now living in Raleigh. We began drinking from
this bottle and did not stop until we were both pitiably drunk. The boy who
took that first drink with me has since had some experience with the
effects of alcohol, but at this time he is bravely fighting the good battle
of sobriety and may God always give him the victory. I never could taste
liquor without getting drunk. When one drop passed my lips I became wild
for another, and another, until my sole thought was how to get enough to
satisfy the unquenchable thirst. To-day if I were to dip the point of a
needle into whisky and then touch my tongue with that needle, I would be
unable to resist the burning desire to drink which that infinitesimal atom
would awaken. I would get drunk if hell burst up out of the earth around
me--yes, if I could look down into the flames and see men whose eye-brows
were burnt off, and whose every hair was a burning, blazing, coiling,
hissing snake from their having used the deadly liquid. And if each of
these countless fiery snakes had a tongue of forked fire and could be heard
to scream for miles, and I knew that another drop would cause them to lick
my quivering flesh, yet would I take it. O horror of horrors! I would
plunge into the flames forever and ever. After I once taste I am powerless
to resist. When I was ten years of age I went one Sunday with a neighbor
boy several years older than I, riding on horseback. The course we took was
a favorite one with