It would have been a good deal harder to quit if I hadn’t had that fear of the jail always before me. That took my mind off the opium. The worst hold the drug gets on a man is the mental hold. It becomes a mental habit. A man has to keep a hard grip on his mind; he has to want to quit, first, and keep wanting to quit all the time, then he can do it. I could stick the daytime out. I found something to do; I read, or ate, or walked around the room. I did not dare go out in the daytime, for fear I would be recognized by the police or by some stool pigeon. This worry was always on my mind, and in a way it helped, because while I was thinking of that I was not thinking about the opium. It was the small, still hours of the night that got me. I had to get some sleep and strength for the next day. Every particle of opium I cut off my daily dose cut off just that much sleep. For years in the jail I had slept away all the time I could; I had slept ten or twelve or fourteen hours a day. Now I had to pay back all that sleep I had stolen from myself. I put in twenty-three hours a day waiting for the twenty-fourth, when I could take my little jolt of hop. Every day when the hour arrived I was tempted to take one more good jolt, so that I could have a decent night’s sleep and forget everything for a few hours. But the last words of my friend who had rescued me were always in my ears. “Lay away from that stuff. It will make a bum of you.” Hundreds of times it was just that memory that tipped the balance, and I would take only what I had allowed myself, no more. I believe now I quit because he said that to me. I felt that if I could not do that much, and it was the only thing he ever asked me to do, I wasn’t worthy of the friendship of such a man as he had shown himself to be. Then I would go to bed and try to sleep. After several hours I would get up and go out for a walk, to get some exercise. I would walk as fast as I could for three or four hours in the darkness, always keeping watch for a policeman or for any one who knew me. I would walk until I was tired out, because I was still pretty weak, and it did not take much to tire me. Then I would hope to sleep a little. But in the long, still hours my nerves demanded opium. And I resisted and fought it out till my strength got down to the vanishing point. Then I would get up and drench myself with whisky and wash it down with absinth. My room looked like a cross between a drug store and a distillery. I had bottles of tonics, invalid’s port wine, whisky and absinth. I would take a drink out of every bottle in the room and fall down on the bed or on the floor in a stupor and sleep for a few hours. In this manner I stuck it out. I took a small portion of hop each evening, reducing it daily according to the system I planned. Finally I got to the stage where I could skip one day’s portion and get two hours’ natural sleep.