3 
before me now! The low murmur of the 
■sighing wind; the dying rays of the setting 
sun, stealing sofdly through the faded cur¬ 
tains: the pale, patient face of my mother, 
as she bent over father’s bloated form and 
bathed his throbbing temples; and the 
horrid shrieks of my father, as lie waved 
-and tossed in wild delirium, formed an im¬ 
pression whi h time can never efface from 
memory. Strange, you think, that I should 
have become a drunkard after, such a lesson 
-as this. That is because you do not under¬ 
stand the power of a drunkard’s appetite. 
It is till nonsense to talk of controlling by 
will power. The truth is the will is the 
first victim to the deadly beverage. Why, 
I have seen the time when I would wade 
through fire, or face a loaded cannon for a 
.glass of liquor, and yet it wasn’t the liquor 
I wanted; it was to quench the fires of my 
burning appetite. I never intended to 
become a confirmed drunkard. 
“Like thousands of other young men 1 
thought I could drink moderately. I loved 
liquor, but I fancied I had will power 
sufficient to control, my appetite. After the 
death of my father, mother sold our little 
home in New Hampshire, and moved to 
Ohio. Here we rented a small house and 
lot, and mother took in washing, while my 
brother and I hired out to a neighboring 
farmer; by this means we managed to sup¬ 
port the family, although, for a time, the 
struggle with poverty was a hard one. By 
-careful self-sacrificing economy, mother 
managed to lay by a small sum of money, 
and at the age of seventeen I was sent 
away to school. There I fell in with fast 
companions, an 1 my habits already formed 
.grew upon me rapidly. I ma le great ad¬ 
vancements in my studies, and graduated 
with high honors at the age of twenty- 
three. A bright future seemed opening- 
before me. Scores of friends thronged 
around me, and grew enthusiastic in sound¬ 
ing my praises. They said I was a genius, 
and perhaps I was; but what matters it 
how bright the flower, after it has been 
blighted by the winter’s blast, or how 
brilliant the meteor after it has gone out 
in the'midnight blackness. 
“After leaving college, I secured a situa¬ 
tion as teacher in the public'schools in the 
village of N-; and fora time did well; 
hut as time went on, the coils of the dead¬ 
ly serpent tighten d. and soon I fell a 
hopeless and lud dess victim. IdA friends 
did everything in Jabr power to reform 
me, but in vain. Hep atedly I signed the 
pledge, but as often violated it. Again and 
again I struggled to rise, and in the strength 
of manhood to shake oil the shackles that 
bound me, but the chain of habit was too 
strong to be broken, and I only sank the 
deeper in hopeless derp T. You may talk 
of reforming men by moral suasion, but I 
tell you when once the fatal habit is form¬ 
ed there is little h p •. You may tell the 
victim lie is drinking poison; lie knows 
that already; tell his. he is wrecking his 
fortune, destroying Ills constitution, and 
hurrying downward to irresistible ruin; 
nobody knows *thai: better than lie does; 
tell him that he is bringing unhappiness to 
' is friends, and Lighting his brightest 
hopes; he knows only tou well the truth 
of this; y^t he drinks on—drinks while 
disease tortures his shattered frame and 
delirium preys upon his _ rum-shackled 
brain, drinks while dea,h waits at his door, 
and horrid dreams shriek out his doom, 
drinks while his child mu are clad in rags, 
and his heart-broken wife pleads from the 
desolation of a drunkard’s home! As long 
as liquor is to be had. the drunkard will 
have it. Ills appetite kno ws no logic but 
necessity. It's nonsense for temperance 
men to preach and lecture to the confirmed 
drunkard, w. die they lie. use two or three 
hundred thousand men to sell him liquor. 
If temperance irn n. v-ally want to reform 
the drunkard, they ought to remove temp¬ 
tation from his way. 
“But to. resume my -dcry. While at col¬ 
lege I made the acquaintance of an esteem¬ 
ed and respectable y ung lady named 
Smith. I have her phuure now,*’ and he 
drew from beneath I d tottered rags a min¬ 
iature. exhibiting a face of remarkable 
beauty. 
“Pretty good looking girl,” said Tom, 
examining the aimin', lire. 
“Yes,” he said, “and : he va as good as 
'She was beautiful; a true woman in every 
sense of the word; gentle, affectionate, 
refined. But why enumerate her virtues V 
