crushed out under the iron heel of grim
adversity. If she had once thought too much of herself, and too little
of her husband, a great change succeeded; for she clung to him in all
the cruel and disgusting forms his abandonment assumed, and, with a
self-sacrificing devotion, struggled with the fearful odds against her
to retain for her husband and children some little warmth in the humble
home where they were hidden from the world in which they once moved.

From the drunkard, angels withdraw themselves, and evil spirits come
into nearer companionship; hence, the bestiality and cruelty of
drunkenness. The man, changing his internal associates, receives by
inflex a new order of influence, and passively acts therefrom. He
becomes, for the time, the human agent by which evil spirits effect
their wicked purposes; and it usually happens that those who are
nearest allied to him, and who have the first claims on him for
support, protection, and love, are they who feel the heaviest weight of
infernal malice. The husband and father too often becomes, in the hands
of his evil associates, the cruel persecutor of those he should love
and guard with the tenderest solicitude. So it was in the case of Henry
Ellis. His manly nature underwent a gradually progressing change, until
the image of God was wellnigh obliterated from his soul. After the
lapse of five miserable years, let us introduce him and his family once
more to the reader.

Five years! What a work has been done in that time! Not in a pleasant
home, surrounded with every comfort, as we last saw them, will they be
found. Alas, no!

It was late in the year. Frost had already done its work upon the
embrowned forests, and leaf by leaf the withered foliage had dropped
away or been swept in clouds before the autumnal winds. Feebler and
feebler grew, daily, the sun's planting rays, colder the air, and more
cheerless the aspect of nature.

One evening,--it was late in November, and the day had been damp and
cold,--a woman, whose thin care-worn face and slender form marked her
as an invalid, or one whose spirits had been broken by trouble, was
busying herself in the preparation of supper. A girl, between twelve
and thirteen years of age, was trying to amuse a child two years old,
who, from some cause, was in a fretful humour; and a little girl in her
seventh year was occupied with a book, in which she was spelling out a
lesson that had been given by her mother. This was the famil