Thus began one of the
most maniacal and terrible drunks of my life. I became possessed of the
wildest and most unreal thoughts that ever entered a crazed brain. I abused
and misrepresented my best friends, and cursed everything but the thrice
cursed liquor which was burning up my body and soul. I told absurd and
terrible stories about the places where I had been, and about the friends
who had done most for me. I was insane--as utterly so for the time as the
worst case in the asylum. I knew not what I did or said, and yet my actions
and words were cunningly contrived to deceive.
For the greater part of the fifteen days which followed I was as
unconscious of what I did or said as if I had been dead and buried in the
bottom of the sea. What I know of the time I have learned since from the
lips of others. The hideous, fiendish serpent of drunkenness possessed my
whole being. I felt him in every nerve, bone, sinew, fiber, and drop of
blood in my body. There were moments when a glimmer of reason came to me,
and with it a pang that shriveled my soul. During the period that I was
drinking I was in Rushville, after leaving Indianapolis, Falmouth and
Cambridge City.
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