perspiration, utterly exhausted, and feeling a dreadful certainty of
the renewal of my torments.

By the mercy of God I survived this awful seizure; and when I rose, a
weak, broken-down man, and surveyed my ghastly features in a glass, I
thought of my mother, and asked myself how I had obeyed the
instructions I had received from her lips, and to what advantage I had
turned the lessons she had taught me. I remembered her prayers and
tears, thought of what I had been but a few short months before, and
contrasted my situation with what it then was. Oh! how keen were my
own rebukes; and in the excitement of the moment I resolved to lead a
better life, and abstain from the accursed cup.

For about a month, terrified by what I had suffered, I adhered to my
resolution, then my wife came home, and in my joy at her return I flung
my good resolutions to the wind, and foolishly fancying that I could
now restrain my appetite, which had for a whole month remained in
subjection, I took a glass of brandy. That glass aroused the
slumbering demon, who would not be satisfied by so tiny a libation.
Another and another succeeded, until I was again far advanced in the
career of intemperance. The night of my wife's return I went to bed
intoxicated.

I will not detain the reader by the particulars of my everyday life at
this time; they may easily be imagined from what has already been
stated. My previous bitter experience, one would think, might have
operated as a warning; but none save the inebriate can tell the almost
resistless strength of the temptations which assail him. I did not,
however, make quite so deep a plunge as before. My tools I had given
into the hands of Mr. Gray, for whom I worked, receiving about five