only once during these months was I positively overcome by it, and I was very ready to cheat myself into the belief that other causes were in fault besides, and as much as alcohol. The ensuing summer I spent partly in Cambridge and partly in travelling with the invalid who still survived; and with health considerably improved I continued stimulus, though I think in rather less quantities than in the winter preceding. Once, however, I was badly intoxicated with port wine, and so ill as greatly to alarm my friends and induce them to call in a physician, who administered a powerful emetic. Whether or not he understood the nature of my ailment I never knew. My friends I think did not, and I was very willing to cheat myself into the belief that the wine thus affected me because I was ill from other causes. At the close of August of this year I went to Brooklyn, New York, to preach for a few Sundays to a handful of persons who had just united to attempt forming a new religious society. I remained through the winter following. A society was gathered; I was installed over it, and there continued till the summer of 1837. These four years were to me tremendous years. They seem to me, in looking back, like a long, sick, feverish dream. Even now I can hardly but shudder at the remembrance of glooms of midnight blackness and sufferings that mock all endeavors at description: for it absolutely appears to me on the review that not for one week of these four years was I a free, healthful, sober, man; not one week but I was rent by a fierce conflict between "the law of the members and the law of the mind." How it was I executed the amount I did, of intellectual labor--how it was I accomplished the results I did, Is to me an impenetrable mystery. I began to address in a hired school-house a handful of persons, having most of them but a slight mutual acquaintance, and in my farewell discourse I addressed a fair-sized, closely-united congregation assembled in their own conveniently-spacious church, with the organization and all the customary belongings of the oldest worshiping societies. Not one Sunday of that time was I disenabled by my fatal habits to perform the customary offices; but I did not understand my condition in any thing like its reality as now I look back upon it. My actual state was known to but very few in its entireness--I may say to absolutely none of those I daily companied with--and I did at the close of that period receive an honorable dismissal at my own request, a request made for reasons distinct from this; nor between myself and people, or any of them, was there ever a word exchanged on this subject from first to last. "Truth is strange, stranger than fiction." I shall not attempt going through these years in detail. I went to Brooklyn with the habit of depending on alcohol to a considerable extent for physical tone and mental excitement, though not with the _habit_ of losing my balance thereby.