But the recovery of his own senses from that frenzy of anger was more horrible than anything he had ever before experienced. From that time he had never been able to exorcise the haunting presence of that black phantom, standing waiting for him at the terminus of his earthly path, from which he could not escape; to which every breath and every step drew him nearer and nearer! From that time he had felt in some baleful moment of extreme exasperation, some irresponsible moment of mad and blind passion, he should strike a fatal blow. Yet he said he agonized in soul to escape that black crime; he struggled to conquer his angry passions; he sought the grace of God, and hoped that he had possessed it; he swore off from alcohol, that stimulus might not be added to his other excitements to anger--to the inevitable provocations arising from his temperament, position and circumstances--provocations that were constantly exasperating his soul to madness. For years, he said, no eye but the Lord's had seen the desperate war his spirit had waged with the powers of evil within and around him, and waged successfully, until one trying season, when, in the utter prostration of sorrow and despondency, he had been tempted to place again the maddening glass to his lips--tempted by the sophistry that prescribed the moral poison as a medicine; then he lost the habit, and at last the power of self-control, and one fatal day, when amazed and bewildered with exceeding sorrow, and stung to frenzy with the sense of wrong-suffering and cruelty, he had struck the blow that laid his master dead before him. [Footnote 2: I use here the precise words of the unhappy man, as they were repeated to me.]