dared utter such oaths, they now poured from me, at the top of my
lungs, as I cursed my father sitting there underground and
gambling with long-haired, long-nailed Chinamen.

It is a wonder that I did not burst my heart or brain that night.
A seven-year-old child's arteries and nerve-centres are scarcely
fitted to endure the terrific paroxysms that convulsed me. No one
slept in the thin, frame farm-house that night when John
Barleycorn had his will of me. And Larry, under the bridge, had
no delirium like mine. I am confident that his sleep was
stupefied and dreamless, and that he awoke next day merely to
heaviness and moroseness, and that if he lives to-day he does not
remember that night, so passing was it as an incident. But my
brain was seared for ever by that experience. Writing now, thirty
years afterward, every vision is as distinct, as sharp-cut, every
pain as vital and terrible, as on that night.

I was sick for days afterward, and I needed none of my mother's
injunctions to avoid John Barleycorn in the future. My mother had
been dreadfully shocked. She held that I had done wrong, very
wrong, and that I had gone contrary to all her teaching. And how
was I, who was never allowed to talk back, who lacked the very
words with which to express my psychology--how was I to tell my
mother that it was her teaching that was directly responsible for
my drunkenness? Had it not been for her theories about dark eyes
and Italian character, I should never have wet my lips with the
sour, bitter wine. And not until man-grown did I tell her the
true inwardness of that disgraceful affair.

In those after days of sickness, I was confused on some points,