Part 6

Perhaps man has nearly run his course in this world, and is about to disappear, like the mammoth, and give place to some nobler kind of creature who will manage the estate better than the present occupant. Certainly we cannot boast of having done very well with it, nor could we complain if we should receive notice to leave. Perhaps James Watt came into the world to extinguish his species. If so, it is well. Let us go on eating, drinking, smoking, over-working, idling, men killing themselves to buy clothes for their wives, wives killing themselves by wearing them, children petted and candied into imbecility and diphtheria. In that case, of course, there will be no Coming Man, and we need not take the trouble to inquire what he will do.

But probably the instinct of self-preservation will assert itself in time, and an antidote to the steam-engine will be found before it has impaired the whole race beyond recovery. To have discovered the truth with regard to the effects of alcohol upon the system was of itself no slight triumph of the self-preserving principle. It is probable that the truly helpful men of the next hundred years will occupy themselves very much with the physical welfare of the race, without which no other welfare is possible.

INEBRIATE ASYLUMS, AND A VISIT TO ONE.

There are two kinds of drunkards,--the Regular and the Occasional. Of each of these two classes there are several varieties, and, indeed, there are no two cases precisely alike; but every drunkard in the world is either a person who has lost the power to refrain from drinking a certain large quantity of alcoholic liquor every day, or he is one who has lost the power to refrain from drinking an uncertain enormous quantity now and then.

Few get drunk habitually who can refrain. If they could refrain, they would; for to no creatures is drunkenness so loathsome and temperance so engaging as to seven tenths of the drunkards. There are a few very coarse men, of heavy, stolid, animal organization, who almost seem formed by nature to absorb alcohol, and in whom there is not enough of manhood to be ashamed of its degradation. These Dr. Albert Day, the superintendent of the New York State Inebriate Asylum, sometimes calls Natural Drunkards. They like strong drink for its own sake; they have a kind of sulky enjoyment of its muddling effect upon such brains as they happen to have; and when once the habit is fixed, nothing can deliver them except stone walls and iron bars. There are also a few drunkards of very light calibre, trifling persons, incapable of serious reflection or of a serious purpose, their very terrors being trivial and transitory, who do not care for the ruin in which they are involved. Generally speaking, however, drunkards hate the servitude into which they have had the misfortune to fall; they long to escape from it, have often tried to escape, and if they have given up, it is only after having so many times slidden back into the abyss, that they feel it would be of no use to climb again. As Mrs. H. B. Stowe remarks, with that excellent charity of hers, which is but another name for refined justice, "Many a drunkard has expended more virtue in vain endeavors to break his chain than suffices to carry an ordinary Christian to heaven."

The daily life of one of the steady drunkards is like this: upon getting up in the morning, after a heavy, restless, drunkard's sleep, he is miserable beyond expression, and almost helpless. In very bad cases, he will see double, and his hands will tremble so that he cannot lift to his lips the glass for which he has a desire amounting to mania. Two or three stiff glasses of spirituous liquor will restore him so far that he can control his muscles, and get about without betraying his condition. After being up an hour, and drinking every ten or fifteen minutes, he will usually be able to eat a pretty good breakfast, which, with the aid of coffee, tobacco, and a comparatively small quantity of liquor, he will be able to digest. After breakfast, for some hours he will generally be able to transact routine business, and associate with his fellows without exciting their pity or contempt. As dinner-time draws near he feels the necessity of creating an appetite; which he often accomplishes by drinking some of those infernal compounds which are advertised on the eternal rocks and mountain-sides as Bitters,--a mixture of bad drugs with worse spirits. These bitters do lash the torpid powers into a momentary, morbid, fierce activity, which enables the victim to eat even a superabundant dinner. The false excitement subsides, but the dinner remains, and it has to be digested. This calls for an occasional drink for three or four hours, after which the system is exhausted, and the man feels dull and languid. He is exhausted, but he is not tranquil; he craves a continuation of the stimulant with a craving which human nature, so abused and perverted, never resists. By this time it is evening, when all the apparatus of temptation is in the fullest activity, and all the loose population of the town is abroad. He now begins his evening debauch, and keeps up a steady drinking until he can drink no more, when he stumbles home to sleep off the stupefying fumes, and awake to the horror and decrepitude of a drunkard's morning.

The quantity of spirituous liquor required to keep one of these unhappy men in this degrading slavery varies from a pint a day to two quarts. Many drunkards consume a quart of whiskey every day for years. The regular allowance of one gentleman of the highest position, both social and official, who made his way to the Inebriate Asylum, had been two quarts of brandy a day for about five years. The most remarkable known case is that of a hoary-headed man of education and fortune, residing in the city of New York, who confesses to taking "fifty drinks a day" of whiskey,--ten drinks to a bottle, and five bottles to a gallon. One gallon of liquor, he says, goes down his old throat every day of the year. Before he is fit to eat his breakfast in the morning he has to drink twelve glasses of whiskey, or one bottle and one fifth. Nevertheless, even this poor man is able, for some hours of the morning, to transact what people of property and leisure call business, and, during a part of the evening, to converse in such a way as to amuse persons who can look on and see a human being in such bondage without stopping to think what a tragedy it is. This Old Boy never has to be carried home, I believe. He is one of those most hopeless drunkards who never get drunk, never wallow in the gutter, never do anything to scare or startle them into an attempt to reform. He is like a certain German "puddler" who was pointed out to me in a Pittsburg iron-works, who consumes exactly seven dollars' worth of lager-bier every seven days,--twenty glasses a day, at five cents each. He is also like the men employed in the dismal work of the brewery, who are allowed as much beer as they can drink, and who generally do drink as much as they can. Such persons are always fuddled and stupid, but seldom drunk enough to alarm their neighbors or themselves. Perhaps they are the only persons in all the world who are in any degree justified in passing their lives in a state of suspended intelligence; those of them at least whose duty it is to get inside of enormous beer barrels, and there, in darkness and solitude, in an atmosphere reeking and heavy with stale ale, scrape and mop them out before they are refilled. When you see their dirty, pale faces at the "man-hole" of the barrel, down in the rumbling bowels of the earth, in one of those vast caves of beer in Cincinnati, you catch yourself saying, "Drink, poor devils, drink! Soak what brains you have in beer!" What can a man want with brains in a beer-barrel? But then, you think again, even these poor men need their brains when they get home; and we need that they should have brains on the first Tuesday in November.

It is that going home which makes drunkenness so dire a tragedy. If the drunkard could only shut himself up with a whiskey-barrel, or a pipe of Madeira, and quietly guzzle himself to death, it would be a pity, but it could be borne. He never does this; he goes home to make that home perdition to some good souls that love him, or depend upon him, and cannot give him up. There are men at the Asylum near Binghamton, who have admirable wives, beautiful and accomplished daughters, venerable parents, whose portraits are there in the patient's trunks, and who write daily letters to cheer the absent one, whose absence now, for the firsts time in years, does not terrify them. They are the victims of drunkenness,--they who never taste strong drink. For their deliverance, this Asylum stands upon its hill justified in existing. The men themselves are interesting, valuable, precious, worth every rational effort that can be made to save them; but it is those whom they left at home anxious and desolate that have the first claim upon our consideration.

With regard to these steady, regular drunkards, the point to be noted is this: very few of them can stop drinking while they continue to perform their daily labor; they absolutely depend upon the alcohol to rouse their torpid energies to activity. Their jaded constitutions will not budge without the spur. Everything within them gapes and hungers for the accustomed stimulant. This is the case, even in a literal sense; for it seems, from Dr. Day's dissections, that the general effect of excessive drinking is to enlarge the globules of which the brain, the blood, the liver, and other organs are composed, so that those globules, as it were, stand open-mouthed, empty, athirst, inflamed, and most eager to be filled. A man whose every organ is thus diseased cannot usually take the first step toward cure without ceasing for a while to make any other demands upon himself. This is the great fact of his condition. If he is a true drunkard, i.e. if he has lost the power to do his work without excessive alcoholic stimulation, then there is no cure possible for him without rest. Here we have the simple explanation of Mrs. Stowe's fine remark just quoted. This is why so many thousand wives spend their days in torment between hope and despair,--hope kindled by the husband's efforts to regain possession of himself, and despair caused by his repeated, his inevitable relapses. The unfortunate man tries to do two things at once, the easiest of which is as much as he can accomplish; while the hardest is a task which, even with the advantage of perfect rest, few can perform without assistance.

The Occasional Drunkard is a man who is a teetotaler for a week, two weeks, a month, three months, six months, and who, at the end of his period, is tempted to drink one glass of alcoholic liquor. That one glass has upon him two effects; it rouses the slumbering demon of Desire, and it perverts his moral judgment. All at once his honor and good name, the happiness and dignity of his family, his success in business, all that he held dearest a moment before, seem small to him, and he thinks he has been a fool of late to concern himself so much about them. Or else he thinks he can drink without being found out, and without its doing him the harm it did the last time. Whatever may be the particular delusion that seizes him, the effect is the same; he drinks, and drinks, and drinks, keeping it up sometimes for ten days, or even for several weeks, until the long debauch ends in utter exhaustion or in delirium tremens. He is then compelled to submit to treatment; he must needs go to the Inebriate Asylum of his own bed-room. There, whether he raves or droops, he is the most miserable wretch on earth; for, besides the bodily tortures which he surfers, he has to endure the most desolating pang that a decent human being ever knows,--the loss of his self-respect. He abhors himself and is ashamed; he remembers past relapses and despairs; he cannot look his own children in the face; he wishes he had never been born, or had died in the cursed hour, vividly remembered, when this appetite mastered him first. As his health is restored, his hopes revive; he renews his resolution and he resumes his ordinary routine, subdued, distrustful of himself, and on the watch against temptation. Why he again relapses he can hardly tell, but he always does. Sometimes a snarl in business perplexes him, and he drinks for elucidation. Sometimes melancholy oppresses him, and he drinks to drive dull care away. Sometimes good fortune overtakes him, or an enchanting day in June or October attunes his heart to joy, and he is taken captive by the strong delusion that now is the time to drink and be glad. Often it is lovely woman who offers the wine, and offers it in such a way that he thinks he cannot refuse without incivility or confession. From conversation with the inmates of the Inebriate Asylum, I am confident that Mr. Greeley's assertion with regard to the wine given at the Communion is correct. That sip might be enough to awaken the desire. The mere odor of the wine filling the church might be too much for some men.

There appears to be a physical cause for this extreme susceptibility. Dr. Day has once had the opportunity to examine the brain of a man who, after having been a drunkard, reformed, and lived for some years a teetotaler. He found, to his surprise, that the globules of the brain had not shrunk to their natural size. They did not exhibit the inflammation of the drunkard's brain, but they were still enlarged, and seemed ready on the instant to absorb the fumes of alcohol, and resume their former condition. He thought he saw in this morbid state of the brain the physical part of the reason why a man who has once been a drunkard can never again, as long as he lives, safely take one drop of any alcoholic liquor. He thought he saw why a glass of wine puts the man back instantly to where he was when he drank all the time. He saw the citadel free from the enemy, swept and clean, but undefended, incapable of defence, and its doors opened wide to the enemy's return; so that there was no safety, except in keeping the foe at a distance, away beyond the outermost wall.

There are many varieties of these occasional drunkards, and, as a class, they are perhaps the hardest to cure. Edgar Poe was one of them; half a glass of wine would set him off upon a wild, reckless debauch, that would last for days. All such persons as artists, writers, and actors used to be particularly subject to this malady, before they had any recognized place in the world, or any acknowledged right to exist at all. Men whose labors are intense, but irregular, whose gains are small and uncertain, who would gladly be gentlemen, but are compelled to content themselves with being loafers, are in special danger; and so are men whose toil is extremely monotonous. Printers, especially those who work at night upon newspapers, are, perhaps, of all men the most liable to fall under the dominion of drink. Some of them have persuaded themselves that they rest under a kind of necessity to "go on a tear" now and then, as a relief from such grinding work as theirs. On the contrary, one "tear" creates the temptation to another; for the man goes back to his work weak, depressed, and irritable; the monotony of his labor is aggravated by the incorrectness with which he does it, and the longing to break loose and renew the oblivion of drink strengthens rapidly, until it masters him once more.

Of these periodical drunkards it is as true as it is of their regular brethren, that they cannot conquer the habit without being relieved for a while of their daily labor. This malady is so frequent among us, that hardly an individual will cast his eyes over these pages who cannot call to mind at least one person who has struggled with it for many years, and struggled in vain. They attempt too much. Their periodical "sprees," "benders," or "tears" are a connected series, each a cause and an effect, an heir and a progenitor. After each debauch, the man returns to his routine in just the state of health, in just the state of mind, to be irritated, disgusted, and exhausted by that routine; and, at every moment of weakness, there is always present the temptation to seek the deadly respite of alcohol. The moment arrives when the desire becomes too strong for him, and the victim yields to it by a law as sure, as irresistible, as that which makes the apple seek the earth's centre when it is disengaged from the tree.

It is amazing to see how helpless men can be against such a habit, while they are compelled to continue their daily round of duties. Not ignorant men only, nor bad men, nor weak men, but men of good understanding, of rare gifts, of the loftiest aspirations, of characters the most amiable, engaging, and estimable, and of will sufficient for every purpose but this. They know the ruin that awaits them, or in which they are already involved, better than we other sinners know it; they hate their bondage worse than the most uncharitable of their friends can despise it; they look with unutterable envy upon those who still have dominion over themselves; many, very many of them would give all they have for deliverance; and yet self-deliverance is impossible. There are men among them who have been trying for thirty years to abstain, and still they drink. Some of them have succeeded in lengthening the sober interval, and they will live with strictest correctness for six months or more, and then, taking that first fatal glass, will immediately lose their self-control, and drink furiously for days and nights; drink until they are obliged to use drunken artifice to get the liquid into their mouths,--their hands refusing their office. Whether they take a large quantity of liquor every day, or an immense quantity periodically, makes no great difference, the disease is essentially the same; the difficulties in the way of cure are the same; the remedial measures must be the same. A drunkard, in short, is a person so diseased by alcohol, that he cannot get through his work without keeping his system saturated with it, or without such weariness and irritation as furnish irresistible temptation to a debauch. He is, in other words, a fallen brother, who cannot get upon his feet without help, and who can generally get upon his feet with help.

Upon this truth Inebriate Asylums are founded; their object being to afford the help needed. There are now four such institutions in the United States: one in Boston, opened in 1857, called the Washingtonian Home; one in Media, near Philadelphia, opened in 1867, called the Sanitarium; one at Chicago, opened in 1868; and one at Binghamton, New York, called the New York Inebriate Asylum. The one last named was founded in 1858, if the laying of the corner-stone with grand ceremonial can be called founding it; and it has been opened some years for the reception of patients; but it had no real existence as an asylum for the cure of inebriates until the year 1867, when the present superintendent, Dr. Albert Day, assumed control.

The history of the institution previous to that time ought to be related fully for the warning of a preoccupied and subscribing public, but space cannot be afforded for it here. The substance of it, as developed in sundry reports of trials and pamphlets of testimony, is this: Fifteen or twenty years ago, an English adventurer living in the city of New York, calling himself a doctor, and professing to treat unnamable diseases, thought he saw in this notion of an Inebriate Asylum (then much spoken of) a chance for feathering his nest. He entered upon the enterprise without delay, and he displayed a good deal of nervous energy in getting the charter, collecting money, and erecting the building. The people of Binghamton, misled by his representations, gave a farm of two hundred and fifty-two acres for the future inmates to cultivate, which was two hundred acres too much; and to this tract farms still more superfluous have been added, until the Asylum estate contains more than five hundred acres. An edifice was begun on the scale of an imperial palace, which will have cost, by the time it is finished and furnished, a million dollars. The restless man pervaded the State raising money, and creating public opinion in favor of the institution. For several years he was regarded as one of the great originating philanthropists of the age; and this the more because he always gave out that he was laboring in the cause from pure love of the inebriate, and received no compensation.

But the time came when his real object and true character were revealed. In 1864 he carried his disinterestedness so far as to offer to give to the institution, as part of its permanent fund, the entire amount to which he said he was entitled for services rendered and expenses incurred. This amount was two hundred and thirty-two thousand dollars, which would certainly have been a handsome gift. When he was asked for the items of his account, he said he had charged for eighteen years' services in founding the institution, at thirty-five hundred dollars a year, and the rest was travelling-expenses, clerk hire, and salaries paid to agents. The trustees were puzzled to know how a man who, at the beginning of the enterprise, had no visible property, could have expended so much out of his private resources, while exercising an unremunerated employment. Leaving that conundrum unsolved, they were able at length to conjecture the object of the donation. One of the articles of the charter provided that any person giving ten dollars to the institution should be a stockholder, and entitled to a vote at the election of trustees. Every gift of ten dollars was a vote! If, therefore, this astounding claim had been allowed, and the gift accepted, the audacious villain would have been constituted owner of four fifths of the governing stock, and the absolute controller of the entire property of the institution! It was a bold game, and the strangest part of the story is, that it came near succeeding. It required the most arduous exertions of a public-spirited board of trustees, headed by Dr. Willard Parker, to oust the man who, even after the discovery of his scheme, played his few last cards so well that he had to be bought off by a considerable sum cash down. An incident of the disastrous reign of this individual was the burning of one of the wings of the building, after he had had it well insured. The insurance was paid him ($81,000); and there was a trial for arson,--a crime which is easy to commit, and hard to prove. Binghamton convicted the prisoner, but the jury was obliged to acquit him.

The man and his confederates must have carried off an enormous booty. The local trustees say, in their Report for 1867:--

"Less than two years ago the Asylum received about $81,000 from insurance companies for damage done by fire to the north wing. About $20,000 have since been received from the counties; making from these two sources about $100,000; and, although the buildings and grounds remain in the same unfinished state as when the fire occurred, except a small amount of work done in one or two wards in the south wing, the $100,000 have nearly disappeared.... Aside from the payment of interest and insurance, this money has been expended by Dr. ----, and in just such ways as he thought proper to use it.

"It may well be asked why this is so. The answer is, that Dr. ---- assumes and exercises supreme control, and allows no interference, at least on the part of the resident trustees....

"His control and management of everything connected with the institution has been as absolute in fact, if not in form, as if he were its sole proprietor. He goes to Albany to obtain legislation giving him extraordinary police powers, without as much as even informing the trustees of his intentions. When the iron grates for the windows of the lower ward were obtained, the resident trustees knew nothing of the matter, until they were informed that the patients were looking through barred windows. Everything has been done in the same way. He is not known to have had any other official relation to the institution by regular appointment than that of corresponding secretary, and yet he has exercised a power over its affairs which has defied all restraint. He lives there with his family, without a salary, and without individual resources, and dispenses hospitality or charity to his kindred with as much freedom and unreserve as if he owned everything and had unlimited means at his command. In fact, incredible as it may seem, he claims that he is virtually the owner of the institution. And his claim might have challenged contradiction, had his plans succeeded."

Such things may be done in a community where almost every one is benevolent enough to give money towards an object that promises to mitigate human woe, but where scarcely any one has leisure to watch the expenditure of that sacred treasure!

The institution, after it was open, remained for two years under the blight of this person's control. Everything he did was wrong. Ignorant, obstinate, passionate, fussy, and false,--plausible and obsequious at Albany, a violent despot at the Asylum,--he was, of all the people in the world, the precisely worst man to conduct an experiment so novel and so abounding in difficulties. If he had a theory, it was that an inebriate is something between a criminal and a lunatic, who is to be punished like the one and restrained like the other. His real object seemed to be, after having received payment for a patient six months in advance, to starve and madden him into a sudden departure. The very name chosen by him for the institution proves his hopeless incompetency. "Inebriate Asylum!" That name to-day is, perhaps, the greatest single obstacle to its growth. He began by affixing a stigma to the unfortunate men who had honored themselves by making so gallant an effort at self-recovery. But let the man and his doings pass into oblivion. There never yet was a bad man who was not, upon the whole, a very stupid ass. All the genuine intelligence in the world resides in virtuous minds. When, therefore, I have said that this individual was an unprincipled adventurer, I have also said that he was signally incapable of conducting an institution like this.

While we, in the State of New York, were blundering on in this way, permitting a million dollars of public and private money to be lavished in the attempt to found an asylum, a few quiet people in Boston, aided by a small annual grant from the Legislature, had actually established one, and kept it going for nine years, during which three thousand inebriates had been received, and two thousand of them cured! The thing was accomplished in the simplest way. They hired the best house for the purpose that chanced to be vacant, fitted it up at the least possible expense, installed in it as superintendent an honest man whose heart was in the business, and opened its doors for the reception of patients. By and by, when they had results to show, they asked the Legislature for a little help, which was granted, and has been renewed from year to year ever since. The sum voted has never exceeded five thousand dollars in any year, and there are three men in Boston at this moment reclaimed from drunkenness by the Washingtonian Home who pay taxes enough to support it.

In an enterprise for the management of which no precedents exist, everything of course depends upon the chief. When you have got the right man at the head, you have got everything; and until you have got the right man there, you have got nothing. Albert Day, the superintendent for nine years of the Washingtonian Home at Boston, and during the last year and a half the superintendent of the Asylum at Binghamton, has originated nearly all that is known of the art of curing the mania for alcohol. He struck into the right path at once, guided by instinct and sympathy, rather than by science or reflection. He was not a professional person; he was simply a business man of good New England education, who had two special qualifications for his new position,--first, a singular pity for drunkards; and, secondly, a firm belief that, with timely and right assistance, a majority of them could be restored to self-control. This pity and this faith he had possessed for many years, and they had both grown strong by exercise. When he was a child upon his father's farm in Maine, he saw in his own home and all around him the evils resulting from the general use of alcoholic liquors, so that when the orators of teetotalism came along he was ready to receive their message. He is one of the very few persons now living in the world who never partook of an alcoholic beverage,--so early was he convinced of their preposterous inutility. Losing his father at thirteen, he at once took hold of life in the true Yankee way. He tied up his few worldly effects into a bundle, and, slinging it over his shoulder, walked to a farmer's house not many miles away, and addressed to him a plain question, "Do you want to hire a boy?" to which the farmer with equal directness replied, "Yes." From hoeing corn and chopping wood the lad advanced to an apprenticeship, and learned a mechanical trade; and so made his way to early marriage, decent prosperity, and a seat in the Legislature of Massachusetts. From the age of sixteen he was known, wherever he lived, as a stanch teetotaler, and also as one who would befriend a drunkard after others had abandoned him to his fate.

I once heard Dr. Day relate the occurrence which produced in his mind the conviction that drunkards could be rescued from the domination of their morbid appetite. One evening, when he came home from his work, he heard that a certain Jack Watts, the sot of the neighborhood, was starving with his wife and three young children. After tea he went to see him. In treating this first patient, Albert Day hit upon the very method he has ever since pursued, and so I beg the reader will note the manner in which he proceeded. On entering his cottage he was as polite to him, as considerate of his dignity as head of a household, as he could have been to the first man of the village. "Mr. Watts," said he, after the usual salutations, "I hear you are in straitened circumstances." The man, who was then quite sober, replied: "I am; my two youngest children went to bed crying for food, and I had none to give them. I spent my last three cents over there," pointing to a grog-shop opposite, "and the bar-keeper said to me, as he took the money, says he, 'Jack Watts, you're a fool'; and so I am." Here was a chance for a fine moral lecture. Albert Day indulged in nothing of the kind. He said, "Mr. Watts, excuse me for a few minutes"; and he went out, returning soon with a basket containing some flour, pork, and other materials for a supper. "Now, Mrs. Watts, cook something, and wake your children up, and give them something to eat. I'll call again early in the morning. Good night."

Perfect civility, no reproaches, no lecture, practical help of the kind needed and at the time needed. Observe, too, that the man was in the condition of mind in which patients usually are when they make the confession implied in entering an asylum. He was at the end of his tether. He was--to use the language of the bar-room--"dead beat."

When Mr. Day called the next morning, the family had had their breakfast, and Jack Watts smiled benedictions on the man whom he had been wont to regard as his enemy, because he was the declared enemy of Jack Watts's enemy. Now the time had come for a little talk. Jack Watts explained his circumstances; he had been out of work for a long time, and he had consumed all his substance in drink. Mr. Day listened with respectful attention, spoke to him of various plans for the future, and said that for that day he could give him a dollar's worth of wood-chopping to do. Then they got upon the liquor question. In the softened, receptive mind of Jack Watts, Albert Day deposited the substance of a rational temperance lecture. He spoke to him kindly, respectfully, hopefully, strongly. Jack Watts's mind was convinced; he said he had done with drink forever. He meant it too; and thus he was brought to the second stage on the road to deliverance. In this particular case, resting from labor was out of the question and unnecessary, for the man had been resting too long already, and must needs go to work. The wood was chopped. The dollar to be paid for the work at the close of the day was a fearful ordeal for poor Jack, living fifteen yards from a bar-room. Mr. Day called round in the evening, paid him the dollar without remark, fell into ordinary conversation with the family, and took leave. John stood the test; not a cent of the money found its way into the till of the bar-keeper. Next morning Mr. Day was there again, and, seeing that the patient was going on well, spoke to him further about the future, and glided again into the main topic, dwelling much upon the absolute necessity of total and eternal abstinence. He got the man a place, visited him, held him up, fortified his mind, and so helped him to complete and lasting recovery. Jack Watts never drank again. He died a year or two ago in Maine at a good age, having brought up his family respectably.