rsting into bloom,
plucked by the grim destroyer? Has she fallen a victim to
tight-lacing, over-excitement, and the gaiety and frivolity of
fashionable life?

Here is an educated, refined woman who died of lung starvation. What a
tax human beings pay for breathing impure air! Nature provides them
with a tonic atmosphere, compounded by the divine Chemist, but they
refuse to breathe it in its purity, and so must pay the penalty in
shortened lives. They can live a long time without water, a longer
time without food, clothing, or the so-called comforts of life; they
can live without education or culture, but their lungs must have good,
healthful air-food twenty-four thousand times a day if they would
maintain health. Oh, that they would see, as we do, the intimate
connection between bad air, bad morals, and a tendency to crime!

Here are the ruins of an idolized son and loving husband. Educated and
refined, what infinite possibilities beckoned him onward at the
beginning of his career! But the Devil's agent offered him
imagination, sprightliness, wit, eloquence, bodily strength, and
happiness in _eau de vie_, or "water of life," as he called it, at only
fifteen cents a glass. The best of our company tried to dissuade him,
but to no avail. The poor mortal closed his "bargain" with the
dramseller, and what did he get? A hardened conscience, a ruined home,
a diseased body, a muddled brain, a heartbroken wife, wretched
children, disappointed friends, triumphant enemies, days of remorse,
nights of anguish, an unwept deathbed, an unhonored grave. And only to
think that he is only one of many thousands! "What fools these mortals
be!"

Did he not see the destruction toward which he was rushing with all the
feverish haste of slavish appetite? Ah, yes, but only when it was too
late. In his clenched hand, as he lay dead, was found a crumpled paper
containing the following, in lines barely legible so tremulous were the
nerves of the writer: "Wife, children, and over forty thousand dollars
all gone! I alone am responsible. All has gone down my throat. When
I was twenty-one I had a fortune. I am not yet thirty-five years old.
I have killed my beautiful wife, who died of a broken heart; have
murdered our children with neglect. When this coin is gone I do not
know how I can get my next meal. I shall die a drunken pauper. This
is my last money, and my history. If this bill comes into the hands of
any man who drinks