if my friends were willing, it was by all parties decided that I should go.  I felt glad in my heart that the institution was relieved of all responsibility in my case, for I did not wish to bring reproach upon anyone, and I feared if I remained longer I might take some rash step (abusing the generous kindness of my officers) that would do so.  They had done their whole duty by me, and it remained for me now to do my duty to myself and friends.  But as soon as I got to Indianapolis the pent-up fires of appetite blazed forth, and while on the way to the Union Depot to take the train to Rushville, I gave my friends the slip, and, sneaking like a thief through the alleys, I sought and found an obscure saloon in which I secreted myself and began to drink.  I was once more on the road which leads to perdition.  The old enemy, who had crawled up the walls of the asylum and slimed himself through my grated windows, and coiled around my heart in frightful dreams, again had me in his possession.  Thus began one of the most maniacal and terrible drunks of my life.  I became possessed of the wildest and most unreal thoughts that ever entered a crazed brain.  I abused and misrepresented my best friends, and cursed everything but the thrice cursed liquor which was burning up my body and soul.  I told absurd and terrible stories about the places where I had been, and about the friends who had done most for me.  I was insane—­as utterly so for the time as the worst case in the asylum.  I knew not what I did or said, and yet my actions and words were cunningly contrived to deceive.

For the greater part of the fifteen days which followed I was as unconscious of what I did or said as if I had been dead and buried in the bottom of the sea.  What I know of the time I have learned since from the lips of others.  The hideous, fiendish serpent of drunkenness possessed my whole being.  I felt him in every nerve, bone, sinew, fiber, and drop of blood in my body.  There were moments when a glimmer of reason came to me, and with it a pang that shriveled my soul.  During the period that I was drinking I was in Rushville, after leaving Indianapolis, Falmouth and Cambridge City.  Of course, for the most part of the time, I knew not where I was.  As I think of it now, I know that I was in hell.  My thirst for whisky was positively maddening.  I tried every means to quit, when conscious of my existence:  I voluntarily entered the calaboose more than once, and was locked up, but the instant I got out, the madness caused me to fly where liquor was.  I drank it in enormous quantities, and smothered without quenching the scorching, blazing fires of hell which were making cinders and ashes of every hope and energy of my being.  I made my bed among serpents; I fed on flames and poison; I walked with demons and ghouls; all unutterable and slimy monsters crawled around and over me; every breath that I drew reeked with the odor of death; every beat of my fast-throbbing heart sent the hissing,