could not be induced to do it -- when in fact he would at the very time
be reeking with the fumes of liquor, and perhaps had his pocket then
bulging with a bottle which he had just emptied, and would willingly
have bartered his soul to refill.

I never saw such absolute dominion as the love of liquor had over him.
He was like a man in chains. He confessed it frankly and calmly.
He said he had a disease, and gave me a history of it. It came on him,
he said, in spells; that when he was over one he abhorred it, but when
the fit seized him it came suddenly, and he was in absolute slavery to it.
He said his father was a gentleman of convivial habits (I have heard that
he was very dissipated, though not openly so, and "No. 4" never admitted it).
He was killed at the battle of Bull Run. His mother -- he always spoke of her
with unvarying tenderness and reverence -- had suffered enough, he said,
to canonize her if she were not a saint already; she had brought him up
to have a great horror of liquor, and he had never touched it
till he went into the army. In the army he was in a convivial crowd,
and they had hard marching and poor rations, often none. Liquor was scarce,
and was regarded as a luxury; so although he was very much afraid of it,
yet for good fellowship's sake, and because it was considered mannish,
he used to drink it. Then he got to like it; and then got to feel
the need of it, and took it to stimulate him when he was run down.
This want brought with it a great depression when he did not have
the means to satisfy it. He never liked the actual taste of it;
he said few drunkards did. It was the effect that he was always after.
This increased on him, he said, until finally it was no longer a desire,
but a passion, a necessity; he was obliged to have it. He felt then
that he would commit murder for it. "Why, I dream about it," he said.
"I will tell you what I have done. I have made the most solemn vows,
and have gone to bed and gone to sleep, and waked up and dressed