It was during the early winter of 1892 that I resolved to go to sea. My Hancock Fire Brigade experience was very little responsible for this. I still drank and frequented saloons—practically lived in saloons. Whisky was dangerous, in my opinion, but not wrong. Whisky was dangerous like other dangerous things in the natural world. Men died of whisky; but then, too, fishermen were capsized and drowned, hoboes fell under trains and were cut to pieces. To cope with winds and waves, railroad trains, and bar-rooms, one must use . To get drunk after the manner of men was all right, but one must do it with . No more quarts of whisky for me.  
What really me to go to sea was that I had caught my first vision of the death-road which John Barleycorn maintains for his devotees. It was not a clear vision, however, and there were two phases of it, somewhat at the time. It struck me, from watching those with whom I associated, that the life we were living was more destructive than that lived by the average man.
 
John Barleycorn, by morality, to crime. Everywhere I saw men doing, drunk, what they would never dream of doing sober. And this wasn't the worst of it. It was the penalty that must be paid. Crime was destructive. Saloon-mates I drank with, who were good fellows and harmless, sober, did most violent and lunatic things when they were drunk. And then the police gathered them in and they vanished from our . Sometimes I visited them behind the bars and said good-bye ere they journeyed across the bay to put on the felon's stripes. And time and again I heard the one explanation "IF I HADN'T BEEN DRUNK I WOULDN'T A-DONE IT." And sometimes, under the spell of John Barleycorn, the most things were done—things that shocked even my case-hardened soul.
 
The other phase of the death-road was that of the drunkards, who had a way of turning up their toes without apparent . When they took sick, even with afflic............