til the last hour of
my life--yes, and die and be buried here in the pauper's graveyard, than
ever again go out and drink. And now as I close this chapter with a full
heart, I go down on my knees in supplication to God for strength and grace
to keep me from that which has wrecked all my life and made it a continued
round of sorrow and shame. I ask every one who reads this chapter, to pray
to God for me with all your heart and soul. Oh! men and women, pray for
wretched, miserable, sorrowing, suffering, lonely me.

CHAPTER IV.

School days at Fairview--My first public outbreak--A schoolmate--Drive
to Falmouth--First drink at Falmouth--Disappointment--Drive to Smelser's
Mills--Hostetter's Bitters--The author's opinion of patent medicines,
bitters especially--Boasting--More liquor--Difficulty in lighting
a cigar--A hound that got in bad company--Oysters at Falmouth, and
what befell us while waiting for them--Drunken slumber--A hound in
a crib--Getting awake--The owner of the hound--Sobriety--The Vienna
jug--Another debauch--The exhibition--The end of the school term--Starting
to college at Cincinnati--My companions--The destruction wrought by
alcohol--Dr. Johnson's declaration concerning the indulgence of this
vice--A warning--A dangerous fallacy--Byron's inspiration--Lord
Brougham--Sheridan--Sue--Swinburne--Dr. Carpenter's opinion--An erroneous
idea--Temperance the best aid to thought.

At the age of sixteen I started to school at Fairview, then as now, an
insignificant but pretty village, some four miles from where my father
lived. William M. Thrasher, at this time Professor of Mathematics in the
Butler University, at Irvington, near Indianapolis, was the teacher in
charge of that school, and it is to him that I am under obligations for
about all the "book learning" that I possess. True, I went to college after
that, but I merely skimmed over the studies there assigned me. While at
school at Fairview I improved every opportunity to drink. A fatal instinct
guided me to the rum shop. It was during the first winter of my attendance
at the Fairview school that I was guilty of my first debauch. A young man
from Connersville came over to attend school, and I would remark in passing
that his father was chiefly interested in sending him to Fairview because
he thought that his boy would here be out of temptation. He arrived at noon
one day, and we were immediately made acquainted with each other, an
acquaintance which ri