His nerves will resume their healthy action, and, if he has not reached the stage of cirrhosis of the liver, he will become well and clear-headed. Recollect that this remedy is almost infallible, and then even the most greedy of literary students will hardly reproach me for placing a kind of medical chapter in the quarter usually devoted to disquisitions of another kind. From every side rises the bitter cry of those who see their loved ones falling victims to the seductive scourge; from all quarters the voices of earnest men are raised in passionate pleading; and in every great city there are noble workers who strive to rescue their fellow-creatures from drink as from a gulf of doom. My words are not addressed to the happy beings who can rejoice in the cheerfulness bestowed by wine; I have before me only the fortunes of those to whom wine is a mocker. Far be it from me to find fault with the good and sound-hearted men and women who are never scathed by their innocent potations; my attempt is directed toward saving the wreckages of civilization who perish in the grasp of the destroyer. _March, 1886._ _CONCERNING PEOPLE WHO KNOW THEY ARE GOING WRONG_. Some five years ago a mere accident gave to the world one of the most gruesome and remarkable pieces of literature that has ever perhaps been seen. A convict named Fury confessed to having committed a murder of an atrocious character. He was brought from prison, put on his trial at Durham, and condemned to death. Every chance was given him to escape his doom; but he persisted in providing the authorities with the most minutely accurate chain of evidence against himself; and, in the end, there was nothing for it but to cast him for death. Even when the police blundered, he carefully set them right--and he could not have proved his own guilt more clearly had he been the ablest prosecuting counsel in Britain. He held in his hand a voluminous statement which, as it seems, he wished to read before sentence of death was passed. The Court could not permit the nation's time to be thus expended; so the convict handed his manuscript to a reporter--and we thus have possibly the most absolutely curious of all extant thieves' literature. Somewhere in the recesses of Fury's wild heart there must have been good concealed; for he confessed his worst crime in the interests of justice, and he went to the scaffold with a serious and serene courage which almost made of him a dignified person. But, on his own confession, he must have been all his life long an unmitigated rascal--a predatory beast of the most dangerous kind. From his youth upward he had lived as a professional thief, and his pilferings were various and extensive. The glimpses of sordid villainy which he frankly gives are so poignantly effective that they put into the shade the most dreadful phases in the life of Villon. He was a mean sneaking wretch who supported a miserable existence on the