warning; but none save the inebriate can tell the almost
resistless strength of the temptations which assail him. I did not,
however, make quite so deep a plunge as before. My tools I had given
into the hands of Mr. Gray, for whom I worked, receiving about five
dollars a week. My wages were paid me every night, for I was not to be
trusted with much money at a time, so certain was I to spend a great
portion of it in drink. As it was, I regularly got rid of one third of
what I daily received, for rum.

My wardrobe, as it had, indeed, nearly always been whilst I drank to
excess, was now exceedingly shabby, and it was with the greatest
difficulty that I could manage to procure the necessaries of life. My
wife became very ill. Oh! how miserable I was! Some of the women who
were in attendance on my wife told me to get two quarts of rum. I
procured it, and as it was in the house, and I did not anticipate
serious consequences, I could not withstand the strong temptation to
drink. I did drink, and so freely that the usual effect was produced.
How much I swallowed I cannot tell, but the quantity, judging from the
effects, must have been considerable.

Ten long weary days of suspense passed, at the end of which my wife and
her infant both died. Then came the terribly oppressive feeling that I
was forgotten of God, as well as abandoned by man. All the
consciousness of my dreadful situation pressed heavily, indeed, upon
me, and keenly as a sensitive mind could, did I feel the loss I had
experienced. I drank now to dispel my gloom, or to drown it in the
maddening cup. And soon was it whispered, from one to another, until
the whole town became aware of it, that my wife and child were lying
dead, and that I was drunk! But if ever I was cursed with the faculty
of thought, in all its intensity, it was then. And this was the
degraded condition of one who had been nursed in the lap of piety, and
whose infant tongue had been taught to utter a prayer against being led
into temptation. There in the room where all who had loved me were;
lying in the unconscious slumber of death was I, gazing, with a maudlin
melancholy imprinted on my features, on the dead forms of those who
were flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. During the miserable hours
of darkness I would steal from my lonely bed to the place where my dead
wife and child lay, and, in agony of soul, pass my shaking hand over
their cold faces, and then return to my bed