In this, however,
I was mistaken; and the Doctor assured me it was what he had never done
in his life, except in one instance,--and that was when the preacher,
having occupied two hours with his sermon, was entering upon a third.
In the evening of the 27th of April I heard, at the Tabernacle, New
York, the celebrated Gough deliver a lecture on Temperance. It was to
commence at 8 o'clock; but we had to be there an hour before the time,
in order to get a comfortable place. That hour was a dreary one. The
scraping of throats and the spitting were horrible. It seemed as if
some hundreds of guttural organs were uttering the awfully guttural
sentence, _"Hwch goch dorchog a chwech o berchill cochion."_
At last Gough made his appearance on the platform. He is a slender
young man of three or four and twenty. He told us he had spoken every
night except three for the last thirty nights, and was then very weary,
but thought "what a privilege it is to live and labour in the present
day." He related his own past experience of _delirium tremens_,--how an
iron rod in his hand became a snake,--how a many-bladed knife pierced
his flesh,--how a great face on the wall grinned at and threatened him;
"and yet," he added, "I _knew_ it was a delusion!"
A temperance man, pointing to Gough, had once observed to another,
"What a miserable-looking fellow that is!" "But," replied the other,
"you would not say so, if you saw how he keeps everybody in a roar of
laughter at the public-house till 1 or 2 in the morning.
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