. You never heard such accomplished
profanity. I never heard it also delivered with such eloquence.

I never enjoyed profanity as I enjoyed it then--more than if I had been
uttering it myself. There is nothing like listening to an artist--all
his passions passing away in lava, smoke, thunder, lightning, and
earthquake.

Then this friend said to me: "Now, I will tell you about that. About
sixty years ago that man was a young fellow of twenty-three, and had
just come home from a three years' whaling voyage. He came into that
village of his, happy and proud because now, instead of being chief
mate, he was going to be master of a whaleship, and he was proud and
happy about it.

"Then he found that there had been a kind of a cold frost come upon that
town and the whole region roundabout; for while he had been away the
Father Mathew temperance excitement had come upon the whole region.
Therefore, everybody had taken the pledge; there wasn't anybody for
miles and miles around that had not taken the pledge.

"So you can see what a solitude it was to this young man, who was fond
of his grog. And he was just an outcast, because when they found he
would not join Father Mathew's Society they ostracized him, and he went
about that town three weeks, day and night, in utter loneliness--the
only human being in the whole place who ever took grog, and he had to
take it privately.

"If you don't know what it is to be ostracized, to be shunned by your
fellow-man, may you never know it. Then he recognized that there
was something more valuable in this life than grog, and that is the
fellowship of your fellow-man. And at last he gave it up, and at nine
o'clock one night he went down to the Father Mathew Temperance Society,
and with a broken heart he said: 'Put my name down for membership in
this society.'

"And then he went away crying, and at earliest dawn the next morning
they came for him and routed him out, and they said that new ship of his
was ready to sail on a three years' voyage. In a minute he was on board
that ship and gone.

"And he said--well, he was not out of sight of that town till he began
to repent, but he had made up his mind that he would not take a drink,
and so that whole voyage of three years was a three years' agony to that
man because he saw all the time the mistake he had made.

"He felt it all through; he had constant reminders of it, because the
crew would pass him with their grog, come out on the deck a