(And, in relation to my much later development as a drinker, this whisper, this promise of the things at the back of life, must be noted, for it was destined to play a dire part in my more recent wrestlings with John Barleycorn.) But what gave immediacy to my decision to move on was a trick John Barleycorn played me--a monstrous, incredible trick that showed abysses of intoxication hitherto undreamed.

At one o'clock in the morning, after a prodigious drunk, I was tottering aboard a sloop at the end of the wharf, intending to go to sleep.

The tides sweep through Carquinez Straits as in a mill-race, and the full ebb was on when I stumbled overboard.

There was nobody on the wharf, nobody on the sloop.

I was borne away by the current.