It was no joke, for not to talk of him, too drunk even to hold on to the boat, I was a poor swimmer, and in the deep and cold lake water should never have reached the shore swimming, and I found myself obliged to menace violence.  I raised the steering paddle over his head and assured him with a savageness that reached even his drunken brain, that I should knock him on the head and pitch him overboard if he did not keep perfectly quiet.  There was imminent danger, for the slight boat of that region requires to be treated with the care of a bark canoe, and the menace cowed him so that he quieted down, and watched me like a whipped dog.  I tried to get the bottle away from him, but his drunken cunning anticipated me and he put it far behind him, now and then taking a mouthful of rum to keep down the burning.  Thus, he pulling and I guiding the oars, we ran through the lower lake, seven miles, to a “carry,” where the boat had to be lifted out and carried over into the river above, around a waterfall.  Here I fortunately caught the bottle and sent it down the lake, and we labored on through another lake, three miles, and up a crooked river to another carry into the third lake, on which we lived.  He was too drunk still to be trusted any further, and, leaving the boat at the landing with him beside it, I carried the load over and waited for him to get sober.  After an interval, long enough I thought for him to grow sober enough to carry the boat, I went back and to my amazement he met me, apparently in his right mind, intensely indignant with some one who, having found him in the state of intoxication in which I left him, had given him a drink of what he called “high wines,” i.e. common alcohol, the singular effect of which was to bring him immediately to his senses, and we reached home without further incident.

That night, somewhere near midnight, poor Mrs. Johnson awoke me, begging piteously that I would help her and her daughter to search for her husband, who had disappeared from the house.  Then she told me that he had the habit of falling into desperate melancholy after his drunken fits, and had even attempted suicide, and they had on one occasion cut the rope by which he had hanged himself, barely in time, and she always expected to find him dead somewhere.  We ransacked the house, the loft, the barn, the stable, in all their corners, every shed and nook about the premises and were returning hopeless, to wait for daylight to look for him in the lake, when, as I passed the wood-yard (where the fire-wood was stored and chopped), I heard a groan, and, guided by it, found him lying amongst the chips in the torpor of drunken sleep.  The poor wife, with my assistance, dragged him home and put him to bed, and when I saw him the next morning I heard over and over again his vows and resolutions, his sermons against drink, his repentance and pledges never to touch liquor again.  When I showed incredulity, he offered to bet with me his best yoke of oxen against one hundred dollars that he never would drink another drop as long as he lived.  I thought the bet a safe one for me, at all events, and took it and made him write it down, and it probably kept him from another spree as long as I remained there, but when I saw him again the next summer he was as drunk as ever.  I asked him about my oxen, and he leered and jeered and joked with drunken cunning, but said nothing more.