I got him a place with a friend of mine
which he kept a week, then got drunk. We got hold of him, however,
and sobered him up, and he escaped the police and the justice's court.
Being out of work, and very firm in his resolution never to drink again,
we lent him some money -- a very little -- with which to keep along
a few days, on which he got drunk immediately, and did fall into the hands
of the police, and was sent to jail as before. This, in fact,
was his regular round: into jail, out of jail; a little spell of sobriety,
"an accidental fall", which occurred as soon as he could get a drop of liquor,
and into jail again for thirty or sixty days, according to the degree
of resistance he gave the police -- who always, by their own account,
simply tried to get him to go home, and, by his, insulted him --
and to the violence of the language he applied to them. In this he excelled;
for although as quiet as possible when he was sober, when he was drunk
he was a terror, so the police said, and his resources of vituperation
were cyclopedic. He possessed in this particular department an eloquence
which was incredible. His blasphemy was vast, illimitable, infinite.
He told me once that he could not explain it; that when he was sober
he abhorred profanity, and never uttered an oath; when he was in liquor
his brain took this turn, and distilled blasphemy in volumes.
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