Sometimes the appetite for drink, which was thought to be buried years ago, is roused by the taste or the smell of "the devil in solution," and the wretched victim finds himself a helpless slave to the passion which he thought dead.
When a young man, Hugh Miller once drank the two glasses of whiskey which fell to his share at the usual treat of drink of the masons with whom he worked.

On reaching home he tried to read Bacon's Essays, his favorite book, but he could not distinguish the letters or comprehend the meaning.

"The condition into which I had brought myself was, I felt, one of degradation," said he.

"I had sunk, by my own act, for the time, to a lower level of intelligence than that on which it was my privilege to be placed; and though the state could have been no very favorable one for forming a resolution, I in that hour determined that I should never again sacrifice my capacity of intellectual enjoyment to a drinking usage; and with God's help I was enabled to hold by the determination." In a certain manufacturing town an employer one Saturday paid to his workmen $700 in crisp new bills that had been secretly marked.

On Monday $450 of those identical bills were deposited in the bank by the saloon-keepers.