concentrated on breathing--on breathing the air in the hugest
lung-full gulps I could, pumping the greatest amount of air into
my lungs in the shortest possible time. It was that or death, and
I was a swimmer and diver, and I knew it; and in the most
intolerable agony of prolonged suffocation, during those moments I
was conscious, I faced the wind and the cinders and breathed for
life.

All the rest is a blank. I came to the following evening, in a
water-front lodging-house. I was alone. No doctor had been
called in. And I might well have died there, for Nelson and the
others, deeming me merely "sleeping off my drunk," had let me lie
there in a comatose condition for seventeen hours. Many a man, as
every doctor knows, has died of the sudden impact of a quart or
more of whisky. Usually one reads of them so dying, strong
drinkers, on account of a wager. But I didn't know--then. And so
I learned; and by no virtue nor prowess, but simply through good
fortune and constitution. Again my constitution had triumphed
over John Barleycorn. I had escaped from another death-pit,
dragged myself through another morass, and perilously acquired the
discretion that would enable me to drink wisely for many another
year to come.

Heavens! That was twenty years ago, and I am still very much and
wisely alive; and I have seen much, done much, lived much, in that
intervening score of years; and I shudder when I think how close a
shave I ran, how near I was to missing that splendid fifth of a
century that has been mine. And, oh, it wasn't John Barleycorn's
fault that he didn't get me that night of the Hancock Fire
Brigade.