o disgust them with dram-drinking. My object-lesson was
the more striking because I had honored the inebriate.

The eloquent rector read the burial service over him ten years ago.
For over twenty years he had been a hopeless sot, beggared in fortune,
wrecked in reputation--a by-word and a hissing in a town where he
had once stood among the best and purest. He outlived his son, who
drank himself to death before he was thirty.

Another and later experience was in a fine old farm-house in the
Middle States. There had been a birthday celebration, and neighbors
and friends gathered about a board laden with country dainties, and
congratulated the worthy couple who presided over the feast upon the
four stalwart sons who, with their wives and children, were settled
upon and about an estate that had been for six generations in the
family. Hale, merry fellows they were--a little more red of face and
loud of talk than was quite seemly in a stranger's eyes, but
industrious and "forehanded," and kind of heart to parents, wives and
babies. After dinner we sat under the cherry trees upon the lawn, and
one of the sons brought out a round table, another a tray of glasses,
another a monster bowl of milk punch.

Everybody pledged the patriarch's health in the creamy potation except
myself. Again, I acted upon general principles. Were I a wine-bibber I
should never touch glasses with a young man, or offer him anything
"that could make drunk come." Disliking spirituous draughts of all
kinds, and with the object-lesson of my girlhood branded upon memory,
I refused to taste the brimming glass, even when the pastor of the
household, a genial "dominie," rallied me upon my abstinence. He
offered gallantly, when he found me obdurate, to drink my share, and
had his glass replenished by the reddest-faced and loudest-mouthed of
the farmer-sons.

"_You're_ the right sort, dominie!" he said, with a roar of laughter,
filling the tumbler until it ran over and into the pastor's cuffs.
Whereat the farmer laughed yet more uproariously.

One of the four young men died a while ago of delirium tremens, and
not one of the other three has drawn a sober breath in years. The
parents are dead, the old farm is sold, and the brothers are all poor.
Rum has done it all.

I do not imply that either of these scenes had any marked influence
upon the destiny of the slaves of appetite, except as they were
encouraged to pursue a course tacitly approved by the wise an