beseeching for me the mercy of the infinite God!

That morning the family gathered about the breakfast table, but what a
shadow rested over all. A solemnity of silent sorrow was upon us. The peace
of yesterday had flown with my return home, and the dark misery of my soul
tinged with the shade of the grave's desolation the clouds which were
gathering in our sky. O, how often have I prayed that the time might be
given back, and that it might be in my power to resist the curse; but the
past is implacable as death, and I must bear the tortures that belong to
the memory of that most unhappy day. That day, and for many succeeding
ones, I read an anguish in the saintly face of my mother that I had never
seen there before. My father also bore about with him a look of deep
suffering which haunted me for years. For one day I suffered intensely both
mentally and physically, but being of a strong, vigorous, and healthy
constitution, I was almost completely restored by the following morning. Of
course I resolved and promised my father and mother that I would never
again taste liquor. For some time I faithfully kept my promise, and for
weeks the very thought of liquor was revolting to me. No one becomes a
drunkard in a day or week. Alcohol is a subtle poison, and it takes a long
time for it to so undermine man's system that he finds life almost
intolerable unless stimulated by the hell-broth which must surely destroy
him in the end, unless he closes his lips like a vise against it. But for
me, I never could drink, from my childhood, without coming under the
influence of the accursed poison. I never drank because I liked the taste
of liquor, but because I liked the first effects of it. I was never able to
tell good liquor or rather pure alcohol--for such a thing as good liquor
has never been made--from the worst, the meanest, manufactured from drugs.
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