During my last two years in Brooklyn I made several attempts to break away from opium and other stimulus, and each time made considerable progress. But the same circumstances yet existed that originally led to the evil, and in fact others of the same class had been superadded, while the whole operated with aggravated force, so that I found or thought it impossible to achieve my freedom without disclosing my state, and thus, as I supposed, setting the seal to my own temporal ruin. Once and again, therefore, I went back to my dungeon.
It may here be remarked that the sedentary man has extraordinary difficulties to contend with in such a case. His occupation being lonely, and demanding no bodily exertion, he has little or nothing to draw off, _perforce_, his attention from the innumerable aches and tormenting sensations which beset him, sometimes for months without cessation, in going through the extricating process. To sit still and endure long-protracted torment demands a resolution compared with which the courage that carries one into a battle-field is a paltry thing.
But this bondage so galling, this position so false in all ways, and so severely condemned alike by conscience and honor, determined me at last to attempt my freedom at the cost even of life, if need be. I broke up housekeeping, sent my family away, and commenced the struggle. I had a bad cold at the time, besides a complication of various cares and distresses which probably increased the severity of the trial. Violent brain-fever came on, accompanied with universal inflammation and a host of sensations for which I never could find any name. It seemed as if my arteries and veins ran with boiling water instead of blood, and as the current circulated through the brain I felt as if it actually boiled up against and tossed the skull at the top of my head, as you have seen the water in a tea-kettle rattling the lid. My hearing was affected in a thousand strange ways: I heard a swimming noise which went monotonously on for weeks without cessation. The ocean, with all its varieties of sound, was forever in my hearing. Sometimes I heard the long billowy swell of the sea after a hard blow; again I could hear the sharp, fuming collision of waves in a storm; and then for hours I would listen to the solemn, continuous roar, intermitted with the booming, splashing wash of the tempest-roused surge upon the beach. Almost incessantly, too, I heard whisper ing, sharp and hissing, on every side--outside and inside of my room--and the whisperers I imagined were all saying hard things of myself.
