to feel their force, and resolved to repent; but the
deadly wave seemed to have retired to gather new force, and again swept
over her and prostrated her lower than "the beasts that perish." There
can be no more effectual barrier against the voice of conscience, the
powerful influence of natural affection, and the strivings of the
blessed Spirit of God, than the use of intoxicating drinks.

Her husband had made himself literally a beast: his appearance was
scarcely human; bloated, discolored, tottering, uttering curses, and
sometimes threatening her life. Her constitution after a while gave
away, and she sunk in death, snoring out the few last days of her
existence in a state of stupor, covered with rags and filth. Her husband
had so benumbed every feeling of humanity by his excess, that he seemed
very little affected by her death; and to one who reminded him of their
former respectability, and spoke of the wretched state to which they
were reduced, urging him powerfully, over the dead body of the
self-murdered wife _now_ to desist, he replied stupidly, that there is
an _eleventh hour_.

Four or five years have elapsed, and he is still in the same state of
beastly degradation--his property entirely gone, and he occasionally
earning a few cents, with which to purchase the poison which is
consuming his vitals, and rendering him stupid and dead to every motive
that can be urged for reformation.

Two of the sons of this unhappy man have gone down to death in an awful
manner. Another, in an affray occasioned by intoxication, received such
an injury in the head that his intellect has suffered, and he is subject
to fits of partial derangement. The other two are very intemperate; one
of them apparently lost to all sense of shame.

The circumstances attending the death of one of these young men were
extraordinary. He had become subject to fits in consequence of his
intemperate life; and his wife following the same course, they were
obliged to give up keeping a public-house, and he maintained himself by
fishing. He frequently stopped colored people and others who were
advertised as runaways, and obtained a reward for returning them to
their masters. He was brutally cruel in his treatment of those who thus
fell into his hands, and on one occasion, having apprehended a young
colored man on suspicion of his being a runaway, he confined him; and
taking him in a boat to his master--who had sent him from home on
business--as he was