The latter may be more speedy than pure alcohol, but either will destroy
with fatal certainty and rapidity. I drank, as I have said, for the
effects, and in the first years of my drinking my first emotions were
pleasurable. It sent the blood rushing to the brain, and induced a
succession of vivid and pleasing thoughts. But invariably the depression
that followed was in the same ratio down as the former was up, and after a
time I lost that first pleasant, unnatural feeling, and drank only to
satisfy an indescribable passion or craving. At first the wine glass may
sparkle and foam, but let it never be forgotten that within that sparkle
and foam is concealed the glittering eye of the uncoiled adder. It is the
sparkle of a serpent's skin, the foam of the froth of death. Here I must
confess that for the past five or six years I have not been able to attain
one moment's pleasure from drinking. Every glass that I have touched has
proven to be the Dead Sea's fruit of ashes to my lips. I drank wildly,
insanely, and became oblivious for days and weeks together to all which was
about me, and finally awoke to the horrors which I had sought to drown, but
now intensified a thousand fold.
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