ad married
a good, sound-hearted, respectable farmer's daughter from a neck of land
across the bay, known as Pig Island, and had settled down to what
promised to be a decent, prosperous life.

So far as any one could see, looking from the outside, his life offered
all that a reasonable man could ask for; but suddenly, within a year
after he was married, his feet slipped from the beaten level pathway of
respectability. He began taking to drink.

Why it was that the foul fiend should have leaped astride of his neck,
no man can exactly tell. More than likely it was inheritance, for his
grandfather, who had been a ship-captain--some said a slave-trader--had
died of _mania a potu_, and it is one of those inscrutable rulings of
Divine Providence that the innocent ones of the third and fourth
generation shall suffer because of the sins of their forebears, who have
raised more than one devil to grapple with them, their children, and
children's children. Anyhow, Sandy fell from grace, and within three
years' time had become a confirmed drunkard.

Fortunately no children were born to the couple. But it was one of the
most sad, pitiful sights in the world to see Sandy's patient, sad-eyed
wife leading him home from the tavern, tottering, reeling, helpless,
sodden. Pitiful indeed! Pitiful even from the outside; but if one could
only have looked through that outer husk of visible life, and have
beheld the inner workings of that lost soul--the struggles, the
wrestling with the foul grinning devil that sat astride of him--how much
more would that have been pitiful! And then, if one could have seen and
have realized as the roots from which arose those inner workings, the
hopes, the longings for a better life that filled his heart during the
intervals of sobriety, if one could have sensed but one pang of that
hell-thirst that foreran the mortal struggle that followed, as that
again foreran the inevitable fall into his kennel of lust, and then,
last and greatest, if those righteous neighbors of his who never sinned
and never fell could only have seen the wakening, the bitter agony of
remorse, the groaning horror of self-abasement that ended the
debauchery--Ah! that, indeed, was something to pity beyond man's power
of pitying.

If Sandy's wife had only berated and abused him, if she had even cried
or made a sign of her heart-break, maybe his pangs of remorse might not
have been so deadly bitter and cruel; but her steadfast and unrelaxi