abysses of intoxication hitherto undreamed. At one o'clock in the
morning, after a prodigious drunk, I was tottering aboard a sloop
at the end of the wharf, intending to go to sleep. The tides
sweep through Carquinez Straits as in a mill-race, and the full
ebb was on when I stumbled overboard. There was nobody on the
wharf, nobody on the sloop. I was borne away by the current. I
was not startled. I thought the misadventure delightful. I was a
good swimmer, and in my inflamed condition the contact of the
water with my skin soothed me like cool linen.

And then John Barleycorn played me his maniacal trick. Some
maundering fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me.
I had never been morbid. Thoughts of suicide had never entered my
head. And now that they entered, I thought it fine, a splendid
culminating, a perfect rounding off of my short but exciting
career. I, who had never known girl's love, nor woman's love, nor
the love of children; who had never played in the wide joy-fields
of art, nor climbed the star-cool heights of philosophy, nor seen
with my eyes more than a pin-point's surface of the gorgeous
world; I decided that this was all, that I had seen all, lived
all, been all, that was worth while, and that now was the time to
cease. This was the trick of John Barleycorn, laying me by the
heels of my imagination and in a drug-dream dragging me to death.

Oh, he was convincing. I had really experienced all of life, and
it didn't amount to much. The swinish drunkenness in which I had
lived for months (this was accompanied by the sense of degradation
and the old feeling of conviction of sin) was the last and best,
and I could see for myself what it was worth. There were all the
broken-down old bums and loafers I had bought drinks for. That