without any sense of nausea. His quantity is increased until he
gradually reaches the point when glasses of spirits are poured down with
feverish rapidity. His appetite is sometimes voracious, sometimes
capricious, sometimes absent altogether. His stomach becomes ulcerated,
and he can obtain release from the grinding uneasiness only by feeding
the inflamed organ with more and more alcohol. The liver ceases to act
healthily, the blood becomes charged with bile, and one morning the
wretch awakes feeling that life is not worth having. He has slept like a
log; but all night through his outraged brain has avenged itself by
calling up crowds of hideous dreams. The blood-vessels of the eye are
charged with bilious particles, and these intruding specks give rise to
fearful, exaggerated images of things that never yet were seen on sea or
land. Grim faces leer at the dreamer and make mock of him; frightful
animals pass in procession before him; and hosts of incoherent words are
jabbered in his ear by unholy voices. He wakes, limp, exhausted,
trembling, nauseated, and he feels as if he must choose between suicide
and--more drink. If he drinks at this stage, he is lost; and then is the
time to fix upon him and draw him by main force from the slough.

Now some practitioners say, "Let him drop it gradually;" and they
proceed to stir every molecule of alcohol in the system into vile
activity by adding small doses of wine or spirit to the deadly
accumulation. The man's brain is impoverished, and the mistaken doctors
proceed to impoverish it more, so that a patient who should be cured in
forty-eight hours is kept in dragging misery for a month or more. The
proper mode of treatment is widely different. You want to nourish the
brain speedily, and at any cost, ere the ghastly depression drives the
agonized wretch to the arms of Circe once more. First, then, give him
milk. If you try milk alone, the stomach will not retain it long, so you
must mix the nourishing fluid with soda-water. Half an hour afterwards