Well, then I shall send "It" and all the smaller "Its" to the right about. I shall have two or three strong pegs. Then physical pains, all mental horrors, will disappear at once. But I shall be back again under the sea nevertheless. I shan't realise, as I am realising now, the abnormality of my life. But I should say that I have an hour at least before I need have any more whiskey, before that becomes imperative. So here goes for a revelation more real and minute than de Quincey, though, lamentable fact! in most inferior prose! Here this passage ends. It is obvious from what follows that the period of expected freedom came to an end long before the author expected. Excited by what he proposed to do, he had spent too much of his brief energy in explaining it. Mechanically he had taken more drink to preserve himself upon the surface--the poisoned mind entirely forgetting what it had just set down--and with mathematic certainty the alcohol had plunged the poet once more beneath the ruining waters. The next entry, undated, is written in a more precise and firmer handwriting. It recalls the small and beautiful caligraphy of the old days. There is no preamble to the bald and hideous confession of mental torture. I wish that my imagination was not so horribly acute and vivid when it is directed towards horrors--as indeed it always seems to be now. I wish, too, that I had never talked curiously to loquacious medical friends and read so many medical books. I am always making amateur, and probably perfectly ridiculous, tests for Locomotor Ataxy and General Paralysis--always shrinking in nameless fear from what so often seems the inevitable onslaught of "It." Meanwhile, with these fears never leaving me for a moment, to what an infinity of mad superstitions I am slave! How I strive, by a bitter, and (really) hideously comic, ritual to stave off the inevitable. Oh, I used to love God and trust in Him. I used to pray to Jesus. Now, like any aborigine I only seek to ward off evil, to propitiate the Devil and the Powers of the Air, to drag the Holy Trinity into a forced compliance with my conjuring tricks. _I can hardly distinguish the devil from God._ Both seem my antagonists. Hardly able to distinguish Light from dark, I employ myself with dirty little conjuring tricks. I well know that all these are the phantasms of a disordered brain! I am not really fool enough to believe that God can be propitiated or Satan kept at bay by movements: touchings and charms. But I obey my demon. These things are a foolish network round my every action and thought. I can't get out of the net.