and quietness;
for, said she, he came to the wake in my house, and read and talked
about temperance, till both the whiskey and the people seemed either
persuaded or frightened, for hardly one had the courage to put to his
lips what Jamie called, indeed too truly, "the accursed thing."

Jamie, however, soon found to his cost that he had commenced a very
great and a very sore work. The spirit-sellers, four of whom were at a
single cross-roads in his neighborhood, he expected to be against him,
and drunkards he expected would be against him too; but he soon found
that his chief opponents lay in quite another quarter. Sensible people
soon began to see that spirit-sellers are drones on the community, doing
no good, but much harm: and, besides, one of them having first allowed a
temperance meeting to be held in his barn, conscientiously shut up his
spirit-shop, and joined the Temperance Society, being convinced that
spirit-selling is poison-selling, and that each spirit-shop might justly
have on its sign-board, "Beggars made here." Of the drunkards, some
indeed did call him hard names, and impute to him base motives; but from
among even these, lost as they seemed to be to all hope, he was, by
God's grace, enabled to reclaim some, as brands snatched from the
burning, while others of them said to him, in the bitterness of their
reflecting moments, Go on, Jamie, your work is God's work. Had you
commenced but a little sooner, what a blessing might your Society have
been to us; but alas, it is all over with us now!

What at first surprised Jamie much was, that the fathers or husbands of
these very drunkards were his most bitter opponents. He went to them
with a glad heart, expecting that they would hear with delight of a plan
by which drunkards, in great numbers, have been reclaimed, and by which
the temperate can be effectually secured against temptation; but his
heart sunk when he found, not that they received him coldly, for to such
receptions he was accustomed, but that they, as well as others who boast
much of being "temperate enough already," lost all temper at the very
sound of temperance.

Some of these neighbors of Jamie were regular in attendance on public
worship, orthodox and strict, which gave them an influence in the
neighborhood. Jamie, therefore, was anxious to enlist them on the side
of temperance. Yet he could not but know, and very seriously consider,
that whether, in market or fair, these same men either bou