from whom every one turns coldly away, and who
preserves himself from sheer starvation, nobody knows how? Alas! such
cases are of too frequent occurrence to be rare items in any man's
experience; and but too often arise from one cause--drunkenness--that
fierce rage for the slow, sure poison, that oversteps every other
consideration; that casts aside wife, children, friends, happiness, and
station; and hurries its victims madly on to degradation and death.

Some of these men have been impelled, by misfortune and misery, to the
vice that has degraded them. The ruin of worldly expectations, the death
of those they loved, the sorrow that slowly consumes, but will not break
the heart, has driven them wild; and they present the hideous spectacle
of madmen, slowly dying by their own hands. But by far the greater part
have wilfully, and with open eyes, plunged into the gulf from which the
man who once enters it never rises more, but into which he sinks deeper
and deeper down, until recovery is hopeless.

Such a man as this once stood by the bedside of his dying wife, while his
children knelt around, and mingled loud bursts of grief with their
innocent prayers. The room was scantily and meanly furnished; and it
needed but a glance at the pale form from which the light of life was
fast passing away, to know that grief, and want, and anxious care, had
been busy at the heart for many a weary year. An elderly woman, with her
face bathed in tears, was supporting the head of the dying woman--her
daughter--on her arm. But it was not towards her that the was face
turned; it was not her hand that the cold and trembling fingers clasped;
they pressed the husband's arm; the eyes so soon to be closed in death
rested on his face, and the man shook beneath their gaze. His dress was
slovenly and disordered, his face inflamed, his eyes bloodshot and heavy.
He had been summoned from some wild debauch to the bed of sorrow and
death.

A shaded lamp by the bed-side cast a dim light on the figures around, and
left the remainder of the room in thick, deep shadow. The silence of
night prevailed without the house, and the stillness of death was in the
chamber. A watch hung over the mantel-shelf; its low ticking was the
only sound that broke the profound quiet, but it was a solemn one, for
well they knew, who heard it, that before it had recorded the passing of
another hour, it would beat the knell of a departed spirit.

It is a dreadful thin