; but hope is so sweet!
Yesterday morning my husband seemed more like himself than he has for
years. He kissed us when he went away and promised to be home early. We
were all very happy. He is such a kind, good man when he is himself. Oh!
if only he had never crossed the threshold of that gilded trap of hell.
Those men's names burn in my mind. I wonder if such men as Allison,
Russell and Joy have hearts.

"'Cora fixed supper, and then we waited. He did not come; but I felt so
sure some way that he would that I was not uneasy. The children finally
had to eat alone. About 9 o'clock he came. Dear Miss Thorn, if you have
never seen a raving, frenzied man, pray God you never may. This was the
way he came home. He had had just enough of liquor to fire up a gnawing,
burning pain and not enough to satisfy him. He came directly to the bed
and demanded the money he had given me in the morning. I told him it was
gone. He swore an oath, and asked me where. I told him Johnnie had spent
it for food. He swore another awful oath, and took up a stick of wood,
with which he began to beat the boy.

"'When you are a mother you can better imagine than I can describe how I
felt, lying helpless in bed, and seeing a man, my own husband, so
cruelly beating my innocent child. Cora, poor Cora, went bravely to her
brother's rescue, and her father, God forgive him, beat her until the
blood came from his blows, and she fell to the floor, and then he kicked
her.

"'I could stand this no longer. I sprang from the bed, but I was weak. I
could do nothing, and he, the man who promised before God to protect me,
kicked me, too. It seemed to me then that his boot-toe pierced my heart.
Johnnie ran out to call some one in, but before he returned my husband
had taken the blankets and other things that he could pawn and had gone.

"'Perhaps you think it strange for me to tell these things to you, but
my heart is bursting and my brain is on fire with such misery that I
must talk. Come and see what a man can do when crazed with rum--a good
father when he is himself--and in a Christian country! Where are the
preachers and the people who call themselves God's people, that they do
not drive away forever the cause of all this?'

"I looked at the girl Cora; and I wish, father, that she might be put on
exhibition in some public show window downtown, conspicuously labeled,
'A specimen of the work done by a father when under the effects of
Christian America's legal