Early in the trial my misgivings as to the result had been frequent; but after the struggle had become thoroughly an earnest one, a kind of cast-iron determination made me sure of a final triumph. The more the agony of pain seemed intolerable, the more seemed to deepen the certainty of my conviction that I should conquer. I thought at times that I could not survive such wretchedness, but no other alternative for many days presented itself to my mind but that of leaving off opium or dying. I recall, indeed, a momentary exception, but the relaxed resolution lasted only as the lightning-flash lasts, though like the lightning it irradiated for a brilliant instant the tumult that was raging within me. For several days previous to this transient weakness the weather had been heavy and lowering, rain falling irregularly, alternating with a heavy Scottish mist. During one of the last days of this protracted storm my old nervous difficulty returned in redoubled strength. Commencing in the shoulder, with its hot needles it crept over the neck and speedily spread its myriad fingers of fire over the nerves that gird the ear, now drawing their burning threads and now vibrating the tense agony of these filaments of sensation. By a leap it next mastered the nerves that surround the eye, driving its forked lightning through each delicate avenue into the brain itself, and confusing and confounding every power of thought and of will. This is neuralgia--such neuralgia as sometimes drives sober men in the agony of their distress into drunkenness, and good men into blasphemy. While suffering under a paroxysm of this kind, rendered all the more difficult to endure from the exhausted state of the body--in doubt even, at intervals, whether my mind was still under my own control--an impulse of almost suicidal despair suggested the thought, "Go back to opium; you can not stand this." The temptation endured but for a moment, "No, I have suffered too much, and I can not go back. I had rather die;" and from that moment the possibility of resuming the habit passed from my mind forever.