ness. His customers began to
find now that the man whose word had never been doubted, and whose
punctuality was proverbial, became so careless and negligent in
attending to his orders, that it was quite useless to rely upon his
promises, and, as a very natural consequence, they began to drop off
one after another, until he found to his cost that a great number of his
best and most respectable supporters ceased to employ him.

When his workmen, too, saw that he had got into tippling and irregular
habits, and that his eye was not, as in the days of his industry,
over them, they naturally became careless and negligent, as did the
apprentices also. Nor was this all; the very individuals who had been
formerly remarkable for steadiness, industry, and sobriety--for Art
would then keep no other--were now, many of them, corrupted by his own
example, and addicted to idleness and drink. This placed him in a very
difficult position; for how, we ask, could he remonstrate with them so
long as he himself transgressed more flagrantly than they did? For this
reason he was often forced to connive at outbreaks of drunkenness and
gross cases of neglect, which no sober man would suffer in those whom he
employed.

"Take care of your business, and your business will take care of you,"
is a good and a wholesome proverb, that cannot bo too strongly impressed
on the minds of the working classes. Art began to feel surprised that
his business was declining, but as yet his good sense was strong enough
to point out to him the cause of it. His mind now became disturbed, for
while he felt conscious that his own neglect and habits of dissipation
occasioned it, he also felt that he was but a child in the strong grasp
of his own propensities. This was anything but a consoling reflection,
and so long as it lasted he was gloomy, morbid, and peevish; his
excellent wife was the first to remark this, and, indeed, was the first
that had occasion to remark it, for even in this stage of his life, the
man who had never spoken to her, or turned his eye upon her, but with
tenderness and affection, now began, especially when influenced by
drink, to give manifestations of temper that grieved her to the heart.
Abroad, however, he was the same good-humored fellow as ever, with a few
rare exceptions--when he got quarrelsome and fought with his companions.
His workmen all were perfectly aware of his accessibility to flattery,
and some of them were not slow to avail them