me—­yes, if I could look down into the flames and see men whose eye-brows were burnt off, and whose every hair was a burning, blazing, coiling, hissing snake from their having used the deadly liquid.  And if each of these countless fiery snakes had a tongue of forked fire and could be heard to scream for miles, and I knew that another drop would cause them to lick my quivering flesh, yet would I take it.  O horror of horrors!  I would plunge into the flames forever and ever.  After I once taste I am powerless to resist.  When I was ten years of age I went one Sunday with a neighbor boy several years older than I, riding on horseback.  The course we took was a favorite one with me for it led toward Raleigh, just north of which place I contrived to get a pint or more of the poison called whisky.  The doctor from whom I got it had, of course, no idea that I was going to drink it, especially all of it, but drink it I did, getting so completely under its horrible influence that when I arrived at home I fell senseless against the door.  My father and mother heard me fall and came out and took me into the house, and just as soon as the heat of the fire began to affect me, I sank into a dead stupor; all consciousness was gone; all feeling was destroyed; all intelligence was obliterated.  I lay upon my bed that night wholly oblivious to everything, knowing not, indeed, that such a creature as myself ever existed.  The morning came at last, and with it I opened my eyes.  Describe who can the thoughts which rushed through my distracted brain.  For a little while I knew not where I was or what I had done.  My head was throbbing, aching, bursting.  I glanced about me and on either side of my bed my father and mother knelt in prayer!  Then did I remember what had befallen me, and so keen was my remorse that I thought I would surely die, and, in fact, I wanted to die.  O, much loved parents—­father on earth and mother in heaven—­how often since then have I felt anew the shame of that terrible hour—­how often have I seen your sacred faces, wet with the tears of that trial, come before me, looking imploringly heavenward as if beseeching for me the mercy of the infinite God!

That morning the family gathered about the breakfast table, but what a shadow rested over all.  A solemnity of silent sorrow was upon us.  The peace of yesterday had flown with my return home, and the dark misery of my soul tinged with the shade of the grave’s desolation the clouds which were gathering in our sky.  O, how often have I prayed that the time might be given back, and that it might be in my power to resist the curse; but the past is implacable as death, and I must bear the tortures that belong to the memory of that most unhappy day.  That day, and for many succeeding ones, I read an anguish in the saintly face of my mother that I had never seen there before.  My father also bore about with him a look of deep suffering which haunted me for years.  For one day I suffered intensely both mentally and