he was telling political
stories in a drinking tavern. When he tired of the tumult of the
bar-room and a sense of his better self came over him, some one said:
"Give us another, Tom." Rising to his feet he said: "You remind me of
a set of bantam chickens, picking the sore head of an eagle when his
wings are broken."

At one time in a temperance revival in Washington he took the pledge
and kept it for months. During this time in a temperance meeting he
was called upon to speak. The following brief extract shows the charm
of his eloquence:

"I would not exchange my conscious being as a strictly sober man, the
glad play with which my pulse now beats healthful music through my
veins, the bounding vivacity with which my life blood courses its
exultant way through every fiber of my frame, the communion high which
my now healthful eye and ear hold with the universe around me, the
splendors of the morning, the softness of the evening sky, the beauty,
the verdure of the earth, the music of winds and waters. No, sir! with
all these grand associations of external nature re-opened to the
avenues of sense, though poverty dogged me, though scorn pointed its
slow finger at me as I passed, though want, destitution and every
element of early misery, save only crime, met my waking eye from day
to day: Not for the brightest wreath that ever encircled a statesman's
brow; not if some angel commissioned by heaven, or rather some demon
sent from hell to test the resisting power of my virtuous resolution,
were to tempt me back to the blighting bowl; not for the honors a
world could bestow, would I cast from me this pledge of a liberated
mind, this talisman against temptation, and plunge again into the
horrors that once beset my path. So help me Heaven, I would spurn
beneath my feet all the gifts a universe could offer, and live and die
as I am--poor but sober."

Drinking young man, Thomas F. Marshall once stood where you now stand.
He said then what you say now, yet after that beautiful tribute to
sobriety and the pledge of total-abstinence, he stood at a blacksmith
shop door, and as the smith drew the red hot iron from the forge, Mr.
Marshall said to some friends: "Gentlemen, I would seize that rod of
heated iron and hold it in my hand till it cools, if it would cure me
of my terrible appetite for strong drink." This is but one of the many
fallen stars the demon of drink has snatched from the galaxy of
Kentucky's greatness and hurled into