people.

"Nothing more likely," replied she, gayly; "I think, Harry, you have
looked pale lately; a glass of wine might do you good."

Had Mrs. G. known all of Harry's past history and temptations, and had
she not been in just the inconsiderate state that very good ladies
sometimes get into at a party, she would sooner have sacrificed her
right hand than to have thrown this observation into the scales; but she
did, and they turned the balance for him.

"You shall be my doctor," he said, as, laughing and coloring, he drank
the glass--and where was the harm? One glass of wine kills nobody; and
yet if a man falls, and knows that in that glass he sacrifices principle
and conscience, every drop may be poison to the soul and body.

Harry felt at that very time that a great internal barrier had given
way; nor was that glass the only one that evening; another, and another,
and another followed; his spirits rose with the wild and feverish gayety
incident to his excitable temperament, and what had been begun in the
society of ladies was completed late at night in the gentlemen's saloon.

Nobody ever knew, or thought, or recognized that that one party had
forever undone this young man; and yet so it was. From that night his
struggle of moral resistance was fatally impaired; not that he yielded
at once and without desperate efforts and struggles, but gradually each
struggle grew weaker, each reform shorter, each resolution more
inefficient; yet at the close of the evening all those friends, mother,
brother, and sister, flattered themselves that every thing had gone on
so well that the next week Mrs. H. thought that it would do to give wine
at the party because Mrs. G. had done it last week, and no harm had come
of it.

In about a year after, the G.'s began to notice and lament the habits of
their young friend, and all unconsciously to wonder how such a fine
young man should be so led astray.

Harry was of a decided and desperate nature; his affections and his
moral sense waged a fierce war with the terrible tyrant--the madness
that had possessed him; and when at last all hope died out, he
determined to avoid the anguish and shame of a drunkard's life by a
suicide's death. Then came to the trembling, heart-stricken mother and
beloved one a wild, incoherent letter of farewell, and he disappeared
from among the living.

In the same quiet parlor, where the sunshine still streams through
flickering leaves, it now rested on the