THE
Barton Experiment

BY THE AUTHOR OF “HELEN’S BABIES”

NEW YORK
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
182 Fifth Avenue
1877

Copyright
By G. P. Putnam’s Sons
1876

PREFACE.

This book is not offered to the public as a finished romance, or even as an attempt at one; the persons who appear on its pages are not only not those who inspire pretty stories, but they are so literally the representatives of individuals who have lived that they cannot well be separated from their natural surroundings. It has seemed to the author that if American people could behold some of the men who have astonished themselves and others by their success as reformers, individual effort would not be so rare in communities where organization is not so easily effected, and where unfortunates are ruined in the midst of their neighbors, while organization is being hoped for. It is more than possible, too, that the accepted business principle that the pocket is the source of power, is not as clearly recognized as it should be in reform movements, and that the struggles of some of the characters outlined herein may throw some light upon this unwelcome but absolute fact.

The ideal reformer, the man of great principles and eloquent arguments, fails to appear in these pages, not because of any doubts as to his existence, but because his is a mental condition to which men attain without much stimulus from without, while it need not be feared that in the direction of individual effort and self-denial, the greatest amount of suggestion will ever urge any one too far.

CONTENTS.

THE
Barton Experiment.

CHAPTER I.
REFORMERS AT WHITE HEAT.

Long and loud rang all the church bells of Barton on a certain summer evening twenty years ago. It was not a Sunday evening, for during an accidental lull there was heard, afar off yet distinctly, the unsanctified notes of the mail-carrier’s horn. And yet the doors of the village stores, which usually stood invitingly open until far into the night, were now tightly closed, while the patrons of the several drinking-shops of Barton congregated quietly within the walls of their respective sources of inspiration, instead of forming, as was their usual wont, lively groups on the sidewalk.

The truth was, Barton was about to indulge in a monster temperance meeting. The “Sons of Temperance,” as well as the “Daughters” and “Cadets” thereof, the “Washingtonians,” the “Total Abstinence Society,” and all various religious bodies in the village had joined their forces for a grand demonstration against King Alcohol. The meeting had been appropriately announced, for several successive Sundays, from each pulpit in Barton; the two school-teachers of Barton had repeatedly informed their pupils of the time and object of the meeting; the “Barton Register” had devoted two leaders and at least a dozen items to the subject; and a poster, in the largest type and reddest ink which the “Register” office could supply, confronted one at every fork and crossing of roads leading to and from Barton, and informed every passer-by that Major Ben Bailey, the well-known champion of the temperance cause, would address the meeting, that the “Crystal Spring Glee Club” would sing a number of stirring songs, and that the Barton Brass Band had also been secured for the evening. The only inducement which might have been lacking was found at the foot of the poster, in the two words, “Admittance Free.”

No wonder the villagers crowded to the Methodist Church, the most commodious gathering-place in the town. Long before the bells had ceased clanging the church was so full that children occupying full seats were accommodatingly taken on the laps of their parents, larger children were lifted to the window-sills, deaf people were removed from the pews to the altar steps, and chairs were brought from the various residences and placed in the aisles. Outside the church, crowds stood about near the windows, while more prudent persons made seats of logs from the woodpile which the country members of the congregation had already commenced to form against the approaching winter.

A sudden hush of the whispering multitude ushered in the clergy of Barton, and, for once, the four reverend gentlemen really seemed desirous of uniting against a common enemy instead of indulging in their customary quadrangular duel. Then, amid a general clapping of hands, the members of the Crystal Spring Glee Club filed in and took reserved seats at the right of the altar; while the Barton Brass Band, announced by a general shriek of “Oh!” from all the children present, seated themselves on a raised platform on the left.

Squire Tomple, the richest and fattest citizen of the town, was elected chairman, and accepted with a benignant smile. Then the Reverend Timotheus Brown, the oldest pastor in the village, prayed earnestly that intemperance might cease to reign. Squire Tomple then called on the band for some instrumental music, which was promptly given and loudly applauded, after which the Crystal Spring Glee Club sang a song with a rousing chorus. Then there was a touching dialogue between a pretended drunkard and his mother, in which the graceless youth was brought to a knowledge of the error of his ways, and moved to make a very full and grammatical confession. Then the band played another air, and the Glee Club sang “Don’t you go, Tommy,” and there was a tableau entitled “The First Glass,” and another of “The Drunkard’s Home,” after which the band played still another air. Then a member of the Executive Committee stepped on tiptoe up to the chairman and whispered to him, and the chairman assumed an air of dignified surprise, edged expectantly to one side of his chair, and finally arose suddenly as another member of the Executive Committee entered the rear door arm-in-arm with the great Major Ben Bailey himself.

The committee-man introduced the Major to the chairman, who in turn made the Major acquainted with the reverend clergy; the audience indulged in a number of critical and approving glances and whispers, and then the chair announced that the speaker of the evening would now instruct and entertain those there present. The speaker of the evening cleared his throat, took a swallow of water, threw his head back, thrust one hand beneath his coat-tails, and opened his discourse.

He was certainly a very able speaker. He explained in a few words the nature of alcohol, and what were its unvarying effects upon the human system; proved to the satisfaction and horror of the audience, from reports of analyses and from liquor-dealers’ handbooks, that most liquors were adulterated, and with impure and dangerous materials; explained how the use of beer and light wines created a taste for stronger liquors; showed the fallacy of the idea that liquor was in any sense nutritious; told a number of amusing stories about men who had been drunk; displayed figures showing how many pounds of bread and meat might be bought with the money spent in the United States for liquor, how many comfortable homes the same money would build, how many suits of clothing it would pay for, how many churches it would erect, and how soon it would pay the National Debt (which in those days was foolishly considered large enough to be talked about). Then, after drawing a touching picture of the drunkard’s home, and dramatically describing the horrors of the drunkard’s death, the gallant Major made an eloquent appeal to all present to forsake forever the poisonous bowl, and dropped into his seat amid a perfect thunder of applause.

The lecture had been a powerful one; it was evident that the speaker had formed a deep impression on the minds of his hearers, for when the pledge was circulated, men and women who never drank snatched it eagerly and appended their names, some parents even putting pencils into baby fingers, and with devout pride helping the little ones to trace their names. Nor were the faithful alone in earnestness, for a loud shout of “Bless the Lord!” from Father Baguss, who was circulating one of the pledges, attracted attention to the fact that the document was being signed by George Doughty, Squire Tomple’s own book-keeper, one of the most promising young men in Barton, except that he occasionally drank. Then the list of names taken in the gallery was read, and it was ascertained that Tom Adams, who drove the brick-yard wagon, and whose sprees were mighty in length and magnitude, had also signed. Half a dozen men hurried into the gallery to congratulate Tom Adams, and so excited that gentleman that he took a pledge and a pencil, went into the crowd outside the church, and soon returned with the names of some of the heaviest drinkers in town.

The excitement increased. Cool-headed men—men who rarely or never drank, yet disapproved of binding pledges—gave in their names almost before they knew it. Elder Hobbedowker moved a temporary suspension of the circulation of the pledges until the Lord could be devoutly thanked for this manifestation of his grace; then the good elder assumed that his motion had been put and carried, and he immediately made an earnest prayer. During the progress of the prayer the leader of the band—perhaps irreverently, but acting under the general excitement—brought his men to attention, and the elder’s “Amen” was drowned in the opening crash of a triumphal march. Then the Glee Club sang “Down with Rum,” but were brought to a sudden stop by the chairman, who excused himself by making the important announcement that their fellow-citizen, Mr. Crupp, who had been a large vender of intoxicating beverages, had declared his intention to abandon the business forever. The four pastors shook hands enthusiastically with each other; while, in response to deafening cheers, the heroic Crupp himself was thrust upon the platform, where, with a trembling voice and a pale though determined face, he reaffirmed his decision. Old Parson Fish hobbled to the front of the pulpit, straightened his bent back until his mien had at once some of the lamb and the lion about it, and, raising his right hand authoritatively, started the doxology, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” in which he was devoutly and uproariously joined by the whole assemblage. This done, the people, by force of habit, waited a moment as if expecting the benediction; then remembering it was not Sunday, they broke into a general and very enthusiastic chat, which ceased only when the sexton, who was a creature of regular habits, announced from the pulpit that the oil in the lamps would last only a few minutes longer, and that he had promised to be at home by ten o’clock.

Squire Tomple took the arm of the penitent Crupp and appropriated him in full. There was a great deal to Squire Tomple besides avoirdupois, and when thoroughly aroused, his enthusiasm was of a magnitude consistent with his size. Besides, Squire Tomple was in the habit of having his own way, as became the richest man in Barton, and he appropriated Mr. Crupp as a matter of course. With Mr. Crupp on his arm and the great cause in his heart, he appeared to himself so fully the master of the situation that the foul fiend of drunkenness seemed conquered forever, and the Squire swung his cane with a triumphal violence which seriously threatened the safety of the villagers in front of and behind him.

The Squire held his peace while surrounded by the home-going crowd, as rightly became a great man; but when he had turned into the street in which Mr. Crupp lived, he said, with due condescension,

“Crupp, you’ve done the right thing; you might have done it sooner, but you can do a great deal of good yet.”

The ex-rumseller quietly replied,

“Yes, if I’m helped at it.”

“Helped? Of course you’ll be helped, if you pray for it. You’ve repented; now address the throne of grace, and——”

“Yes, I know,” interrupted Mr. Crupp. “I’m not entirely unacquainted with the Lord, if I have sold rum. You know his sun shines on the just and the unjust, and I’ve had a good share of it. It’s help from men that I want, and am afraid that I can’t get it.”

“Why, Crupp,” remonstrated the Squire, “you must have made something out of your business, if it is an infernal one.”

“I don’t mean that,” replied Mr. Crupp, a little tartly. “You’ve been on your little drunks when you were young, of course?”

The Squire almost twitched Mr. Crupp off the sidewalk, as he exclaimed, with righteous indignation,

“I never was drunk in my life.”

“Oh!” said the convert. “Well, some have, and pledges won’t quiet an uneasy stomach, no way you can fix ’em. Them that never drank are all right, but the drinking boys that signed to-night’ll be awful thirsty in the morning.”

“Well,” said the Squire, “they must pray, and act like men.”

“Some of ’em don’t believe in prayin’, and some of ’em can’t act like men, because ’tisn’t in ’em. There’s men that seem to need whisky as much as they need bread; leastways, they don’t seem able to do without it.”

“If I’d been you, and believed that, Crupp,” replied the Squire, with noticeable coolness and deliberation, “I wouldn’t have signed the pledge; that is, I wouldn’t have stopped selling liquor.”

“P’r’aps not,” returned the ex-rumseller; “but with me it’s different. There’s some men that b’lieves that sellin’ a woman a paper of pins, and measurin’ out a quart of tar for a farmer, is small business, an’ beneath ’em, but they stick to it. Now I believe I’m too much of a man to sell whisky, so I’ve stopped.”

The Squire took the rebuke in silence; however much his face may have flushed, there were in Barton no tell-tale gas-lamps to make his discomfort visible. The Squire had grown rich as a vender of the thousand little things sold in country stores; he had many a time declared that storekeeping was a dog’s life, and that he, Squire Tomple, was everybody’s nigger—but he made no attempt to change his business.

“What I mean,” continued Mr. Crupp, “by needin’ help, is this: I know just about how much every drinkin’ man in town takes, an’ when he takes it, an’ about when he gets on his sprees. Now, if there’s anybody to take an interest in these fellows at such times, they’re going to have plenty of chances mighty soon.”

CHAPTER II.
BUSINESS vs. PHILANTHROPY.

On the morning after the meeting the happiest man in all Barton was the Reverend Jonas Wedgewell. He had been one of the first to agitate the subject of a grand temperance demonstration; in fact, he had, while preaching the funeral sermon of a young man who had been drowned while drunk, prophesied that the sad event which had on that occasion drawn his hearers together would give a mighty impetus to the temperance movement; then like a sensible, matter-of-fact prophet, he exerted himself to the uttermost that his prophecy might be fulfilled. He subscribed liberally to the fund which paid for advertising the meeting; he labored personally a full hour with the performer on the big drum, and ended by persuading him to forego a coon-hunt on that particular night, that he might take part in a hunt for nobler game. The Reverend Jonas had drafted all the pledges which were circulated during the meeting, and had seen to it that they contained no weak or ungrammatic expressions which might tempt thirsty souls to treat disrespectfully the documents and the principles they embodied. He had reached the church door at the third tap of the bell, had greeted all his reverend brethren with a hearty shake with both his own hands, and had offered the Reverend Timotheus Brown so many pertinent suggestions as to the prayer which that gentleman had been requested to make that the ancient divine remarked, with a touch of saintly sarcasm, that he did not consider that the occasion justified him in making a departure from his habit of offering strictly original prayers.

Through the whole course of the meeting good Pastor Wedgewell sat expectantly on the extreme end of the pulpit sofa, his body inclined a little forward, his hands upon his knees, his eyes gleaming brightly through polished glasses, and his whole pose suggesting the most intense earnestness. He discerned a telling point before its verbal expression was fully completed, his hands commenced to applaud the moment the point was announced; his varnished boots and well-stored head beat time alike to “Lily Dale,” the march from “Norma,” “Sweet Spirit, hear my prayer,” and such other airs as the band was not ashamed to play in public; he sprang from his seat and approvingly patted the youthful backs of the pretended drunkard and his mother, he laughed almost hysterically at the wit of the lecturer, and moistened handkerchief after handkerchief as the able speaker depicted the sad results of drunkenness. While the pledges were being circulated, the reverend man occupied a position which raked the house, and he was the first to announce to the faithful in the front seats the capture of any drinking man. He intercepted Tom Lyker, a tin-shop apprentice, who had signed the pledge, in the aisle, immediately after the audience was dismissed, and suggested that they should together hold a season of prayer in the study attached to the church; and the rather curt manner in which the repentant but not altogether regenerate Thomas declined the invitation did not abash the holy man in the least; for, as the audience finally dispersed, he secured a few faithful ones, with whom he adjourned to the study, and enjoyed what he afterward referred to as a precious season.

Mrs. Wedgewell, who rendered but feeble reverence unto him who was at once her spouse and her spiritual adviser, had been known to say that when the old gentleman was wound up there was no knowing when he would run down again; and all who saw the good man on the morning after the meeting, admitted that his wife’s simile was an uncommonly apt one. Squire Tomple believed so fully in the advantages of the early bird over all others in search of sustenance, that his store was always opened at sunrise; yet George Doughty had just taken the third shutter from the front window, when a gentle tap on the shoulder caused him to drop the rather heavy board upon his toes. As he wrathfully turned himself, he beheld the approving countenance and extended congratulatory hand of the Reverend Wedgewell.

“George, my dear, my noble young friend,” said he, as the irate youth squeezed his agonized toes, “you have performed a most noble and meritorious action—an action which you will never have cause to regret.”

For a moment or two the young man’s face said many things not seemly to express in appropriate words to a clergyman; but he finally recovered his sense of politeness, and replied:

“I hope I shan’t repent of it, but I don’t know. It may be noble and meritorious to sign the pledge, but a fellow needs to have twenty times as much man in him to keep it.”

“Now you don’t mean to say, George, that you’ll allow such a vile appetite to regain its ascendency over you?” pleaded the preacher.

“’Tisn’t a vile appetite,” quickly replied the young man. “I need whisky as much as I need bread and butter—yes, and a great deal more, too. I have to open the store at sunrise, and keep it open till nine o’clock and after, have to make myself agreeable to anywhere from two to twenty people at a time, sell all I can, watch people who will steal the minute your eye is off of them, not let anybody feel neglected, and see that I get cash from everybody who isn’t good pay. When there isn’t anybody here, I’ve got to keep the books, see that the stock don’t run down in spots, and stir up people that are slow pay. The only way I can do it all is by taking something to help me. I hate whisky—I’m going to try to leave it alone; but I tell you, Dominie, it’s going to be one of the biggest fights you ever knew a young man to go into.”

The reverend listener was as easily depressed as he was exalted, and Doughty’s short speech had the effect of greatly elongating the minister’s countenance. Yet he had a great deal of that pertinacity which is as necessary to soldiers of the cross as it is to those of the bayonet; so he began manfully to search his mind for some weapon or means of defense which the clerk could use. Suddenly his countenance brightened, his benevolent eyes enlarged behind his glasses, and he exclaimed:

“Just the thing! My dear young friend, the hand of Providence is in this matter. Your worthy employer was the chairman of our meeting last night; certainly he will be glad to give you such assistance as shall lessen the amount of your labors. Here he comes now. Let me manage this affair; I really ask it as a favor.”

“I’m much obliged, but I think—confound it!” ejaculated the young man, as his companion hastened out of earshot and buttonholed Squire Tomple. Half smiling and half frowning Doughty retired from the door, but took up a new position, from which he could see the couple. To the eyes of the clerk, his employer seemed a rock in his unchanging pose, while the old preacher, rich in many a grace not peculiar to country storekeepers, yet utterly ignorant of business and such of its perversions as are called requirements, seemed a mere lamb—a fancy which was strengthened by the incessant gesturing and change of position in which he indulged when in conversation. The pair soon separated; the minister walked away, his step seeming not so exultant as when he approached the merchant; while the latter, appearing to his clerk to be broader, deeper, and more solid than ever, approached the store, lifted up his head, displayed the face he usually wore when he found he had made a bad debt, and said,

“George, I wish you wouldn’t try to talk about business to ministers. Old Wedgewell has just pestered me nearly to death; says you complain of having too much to do, and that you have to drink to keep up. It’ll be just like him to tell somebody else, and a pretty story that’ll be to go around about the chairman of a temperance meeting.”

“I didn’t mean to say anything to him,” replied the clerk; “but he made me drop a shutter on my toes, and I guess that loosened my tongue a little. I didn’t tell him anything but the truth, though, Squire. I signed the pledge, last night, hoping you’d help me through.”

“What—what do you mean, George?” asked the merchant, in a tone which defined the word “conservative” more clearly than lexicographer ever did.

“I can’t work so many hours a day without drinking sometimes,” replied the clerk. “What I ask of you is to take a boy. If I could come in a couple of hours later every morning—and there’s next to nothing done in the first two hours of the day—I could have a decent amount of rest, not have to hurry so much, and wouldn’t break down so often, and have to go to whisky to be helped up again.”

“A boy would have to be paid,” remarked the Squire in the tone he habitually used when making a penitential speech in class-meeting; “and here’s summer-time coming; there isn’t much business done in summer, you know.”

“A boy won’t cost more than a dollar a week the first year,” replied the clerk, “and you’d make that out of the people who sometimes have to go somewhere else and trade on days when you’re not here and I’m too busy to wait on them. There isn’t so much money made in summer; but women come to the store then a good deal more than they do in the winter, and they take up an awful amount of time. Besides, the store has to be opened about two hours earlier every morning than it does in winter.”

The merchant pinched his gloomy brow and reflected. Doughty looked at him without much hopefulness. The Squire’s heart might be all right, but his pocket-book was by far the more sensitive and controlling organ. At last the Squire said,

“Well, if it’s for your good that you want the boy, you ought to be willing to pay his salary. Besides——”

“Excuse me, Squire Tomple,” interrupted Doughty; “’tisn’t for my good alone. ‘Accursed be he who putteth the bottle to his brother’s lips.’ I’ve heard you quote that to more than one man right in this store. That’s what you’re doing to me if you keep on. You sell half as much again as any other storekeeper in town, and why? Because I am smart enough to hold custom. I haven’t cared to do anything else. I’ve given myself up to making and holding custom for you, and I took to whisky to keep me up to my work.”

“Well, haven’t I paid you for all you’ve done?” demanded the proprietor.

“Yes; but now I ask you to pay a little more. I’ve told you why; and now the case stands just here: which do you care for most, the price of a boy or the soul of your faithful clerk? You say a man’s soul’s in danger if he drinks.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, George,” replied the Squire, “I’ll think about it. I want to do what’s right; but I—I don’t like to have other people’s sins fastened on me.”

CHAPTER III.
A WET BLANKET.

The first task to which the penitent Crupp devoted himself on the morning after the meeting was hardly that which his new admirers had supposed he would attempt. They imagined he would knock in the heads of his barrels, and allow the accursed contents to flood his cellar; but Crupp, on the contrary, closed out the entire lot, for cash, at the highest prices he could exact from dealers with whom he had lately been in competition. “’Twas a splendid lot of liquors,” said Crupp, in the course of an explanatory speech at the post-office, while every one was waiting for the opening of the regular daily mail; “and though I do feel above sellin’ ’em over the counter, they’re better for men that will drink than any that have ever come into Barton since I’ve been here.”

With easier mind and heavier pocket, the ex-rumseller then called upon the Rev. Jonas Wedgewell. That good man’s domestic, although from an ever-green isle whose children do not generally regard whisky with abhorrence, had sympathetically caught the spirit of her employers, and as she had not heard of Mr. Crupp’s change of mind, she left him standing on the piazza while she called Mr. Wedgewell. The divine descended the stairway two steps at a time, dived into the parlor, and had a congratulatory speech half delivered before he discovered that the new convert was not there. He wildly shouted, “Mr. Crupp!” traced the penitent by his voice, escorted him to the parlor with a series of hand-shakings, shoulder-pattings, and bows, and forcibly dropped him into an elegant chair which Mrs. Wedgewell had bought only to show, and in which no member of the family had ever dared to sit.

“Ah, my valiant friend,” said the Rev. Jonas, hastily drawing a chair near Mr. Crupp, and shedding upon him the full effulgence of a countenance beaming with enthusiastic adoration; “the morning songs of the angels of God must have been sweeter this morning as they thought of your noble deed. You have cast off the shackles of a most accursed bondage. Doubtless you wish to fulfill all of the conditions of the liberty with which Christ hath made you free. The church——”

“Excuse me, parson,” interrupted Mr. Crupp; “but I don’t want to join the church—not just now, anyhow. I——”

“Wish to consecrate your ill-gotten gains to the service of the Lord,” broke in the good pastor; but Mr. Crupp frowned, then pouted, then compressed his lips tightly, and gave so sudden a twitch as to wrench one of the joints of the sacred chair, as he replied:

“No, sir, I don’t, for I haven’t any ill-gotten gains. I never sold anything but good liquor, and the price was always fair. I never sold any liquor to a drunken man, either. What I came to you for is this: I know who drinks, when they drink, what they take, and I know pretty well why they drink. Some of them signed the pledge last night, and they’re going to have an awful hard job in keeping it.”

“Prayer——” interrupted the minister, but the hard-headed Crupp quickly completed the sentence.

“Prayer never cured a dyspeptic stomach, that I’ve heard of, and I don’t believe it’ll take away a man’s hunger for whisky. These fellows that’s been drinking, and have got anything to ’em, can be kept from falling into the old ways again; but they’ve got to be handled carefully, and what I came to you for was to ask who was going to do the handling? You know who’s free-handed with money in your congregation, and free-handed men ought to be free-hearted. I’m going to Dominie Brown on the same errand, and to the other preachers, too.”

Mr. Crupp’s speech consumed only a moment of time, but its effect upon the preacher was wonderful—and depressing. From being a mirror of irrepressible Christian exultation, Mr. Wedgewell’s face became as solemn as it ever was when he bemoaned from the pulpit the apathy of the elect. His eyes enlarged behind his glasses, and he stared for a moment in an abstracted manner at a dreadful chromo which hung upon his wall—a chromo at which no one in active possession of his mental faculties could possibly have looked so long. But the old pastor had a heart so great that even his theology had been unable to wall it in, and after a moment of inevitable despondency he realized that Crupp was intent upon doing good.

“Mr. Crupp,” said he, turning his head suddenly, and regaining a portion of his earlier expression of countenance, “I do not fully comprehend your intention, but I can see that it is good. May I ask what the people of God can do for these beings who have been under the dominion of alcohol?”

“Well, it’s a long story,” replied the old bartender. “Among them that signed, there isn’t one in ten that ever drank, and of them that drank, half of ’em’ll take something before night.”

“And break their solemn vow! Awful! awful!” ejaculated the minister.

“Yes,” said Crupp, “’tis awful; but, on the other hand, there’s some that’s in earnest. There’s Tom Adams, now—he that drives the brick-yard team. Tom’s a good, square, honest fellow, and he loves his family, but I don’t see how he’s going to stop drinking. He can’t work without it; leastways, he can’t work along the way he’s working now. Deacon Jones ought to give him easier work to do until he can bring himself around; but Deacon Jones won’t waste his money in that way, if he is a member of your church. Then there’s old Bunley: there isn’t anything to him. He’s been drinking and drinking and drinking this forty year, he says, and yet he was well brought up, and he can’t keep himself from going to church every Sunday. He’s got some children that ain’t grown yet, and if some of the storekeepers would only give him credit without ever expecting to see their money again, the old fellow wouldn’t get down-hearted so often, and maybe he could quit drinking. As far as taking care of his family goes, he isn’t good for much the way he is; he borrows from soft-hearted fellows who can’t afford to lose as well as the storekeepers can, and maybe he steals sometimes—I don’t say he does, mind. At any rate, the biggest part of his support comes out of the public, and as the public can’t help itself, it ought to be sensible enough to try to make the old chap feel and act like a man.”

“Bless me!” exclaimed Mr. Wedgewell, who had through all Mr. Crupp’s delivery sat erect with his hands upon his knees, and his eyes and mouth wide open. “I assure you, my dear sir, that I never had an idea that the success of the temperance cause depended upon so many conditions, and I also beg to assure you”—here the Reverend Jonas hastily proffered his right hand—“that I appreciate and admire the spirit which has prompted you to examine this subject in so many of its bearings, and to endeavor to throw light upon it. But surely all the—the men who, as you express it, have been drinking—surely these cannot be constrained to continue by conditions similar to those which you have instanced? There must be some who, if only they exercise their will-power, will succeed in putting their vile enemy under their feet?”

“Yes,” replied Crupp, “there are such. Lots of young fellows drink only because they think it’s smart, and because they haven’t got man enough in them to stop when they want to. They’re like a lot of wolves—plucky enough when they’re together, but a live rooster could scare one of them if he caught him alone. I’m going to look out for that crowd myself; they need somebody to preach to ’em wherever he can catch ’em, and I know where they hang out. But I’m not through with the other kind yet. There’s Fred Macdonald, he’s going to be the hardest man to manage in the whole lot. Good family, you know—got a judge for a father, and ambitious as the——ambitious as Napoleon Bonaparte. He’s in with all the steamboat fellows, and whisky is an angel alongside of some things they carry. They’ll ruin him, sure. Steamboating looks like something big to him, you know; it shows off better than country stores and saw-mills. It’s no use talkin’ to him; I’ve tried it once or twice, for I know the steamboat people of old; but he as good as told me to mind my own business. Now if some of the business men could get up something enterprising, and put Fred at the head of it, on condition that he wouldn’t drink any more, they might make money and save him from going to the—the bad. I’ll put some money into the thing, for I believe in Fred. Of course he’ll have to be watched a little, for he may be too venturesome; but he can get more trade and get more work out of his men than any other man in this county.”

“Mr. Crupp,” said the minister, again taking the hand of the newly-made reformer, and laying his own left hand affectionately upon Mr. Crupp’s right elbow, “I cannot find words adequate to the expression of my admiration of your earnestness in this great moral movement. But I must confess that your treatment of the subject is one to which I am utterly unaccustomed. I have been wont to regard intemperance solely as an indication of an infirm will and a depraved appetite, but your theory seems plausible; indeed, I do not see that either of our respective standpoints need be wrong. But, with regard to the employment of the reformatory means you suggest, I am not a capable adviser. It might be well for you to consult some of our leading business men.”

“That’s what I am going to do,” replied Crupp. “And I am going to see the doctors, too, and all the other ministers. What I want of you is, to back me up; preach at these fellows that are well enough off to make themselves useful.”

“I’ll do it!” replied the minister with emphasis. “A suitable text has already providentially entered my mind: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Three heads and application: First, demonstrate that every man is his brother’s keeper; second, show how in the divine economy it is wise that this should be so; third, the example of Christ; application, our duty to the needy in our midst. Another text suggests itself: ‘We, then, that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak.’ And yet another: ‘Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish;’ argument to be that if the Inspired Word justifies such action as that implied by the text, and if alcohol is the demon we believe it to be, it is our duty to prevent, by any means in our power, people from reaching a condition in which such a terrible remedy must be used. I beg your pardon, my dear Mr. Crupp,” exclaimed the minister, springing excitedly from his chair; “but if you have any other calls to make, I will repair at once to my study and prepare a discourse based upon one of these texts. Excuse my seeming rudeness in thus abruptly closing our interview, but my soul is on fire—on fire with ardor which I cannot but believe is from heaven.”

“Oh, certainly,” replied Mr. Crupp, rising quite briskly. “Business is business; it’s so in the liquor trade, I know, and I suppose it is in preaching. I’ll go down and see Squire Tomple, I guess.”

The Rev. Jonas Wedgewell dropped abruptly into a chair, and the fire with which his soul had been consuming seemed suddenly to expire. His face became blank and expressionless, his lower jaw dropped a little, and he gasped,

“Squire Tomple? I had a discouraging conversation with him only yesterday morning on a subject involving very nearly the ideas which you have advanced. His very estimable clerk, George Doughty, who signed the pledge at our meeting, asserted that his work must decrease in volume in order that he might continue faithful; so I made haste to intercede for him with his employer, but I did not meet with that encouragement which I had hoped for. Brother Tomple intimated that temperance was temperance and business was business, and even made some remarks which have since seemed to me to contain implications that I was unduly concerned about his affairs.”

“Tomple’s a—a hog, if he is a church member,” replied the irreverent Crupp; “but he’s got to make himself useful if plain talk will do it. It takes all kinds of men to make a world, parson, or to make men act like men to their neighbors. Perhaps if you preachers come down on rich men who hoard their money, and poor men that are about as stingy with how-d’ye-do’s, and if business men show the public that it’s as cheap to reform a pauper as it is to support him, and that it isn’t the thing to stand by, while a man’s killing himself, without sayin’ a word or spendin’ a cent to prevent him—perhaps we can be of some use in the world. Good day, parson.”

CHAPTER IV.
REFORM WITH MONEY IN IT.

Tom Adams, driver of the brick-yard wagon, and signer of one of the pledges circulated at the great temperance meeting, was certainly a man worth saving. He had a wife and was rich in children. His wife was faithful, good-natured, and industrious, and his children were of that bright, irrepressible nature which is about the most valuable of inheritances in this land where other inheritances do not average largely in money value. For the good of such a group it was very desirable that the head of the family should be in the constant possession of strong arms and all his wits. And even for his own sake Tom was worth a great deal more attention than men of his kind ever receive. He was perfectly honest, a hard worker, cheerier in temperament than any pastor in the village, quicker-witted than most of the lawyers within the judicial circuit upon which the town of Barton was situated, and more generous in proportion to his means than any of his well-to-do fellow-citizens. During the season for making and delivering bricks he worked from sunrise to sunset, rendered fair count to seller and buyer, and never abused his employer’s horses. His regular pay was seventy-five cents per day, which sum, in a land where flour was sold at two cents per pound and meat was only twice as high as flour, and a comfortable house could be hired at four dollars per month, paid his family expenses. But the season at the brick-yard lasted only during six months of the twelve. During the remaining six months Tom gladly did any work he could find: he drove teams where any hauling was to be done, chopped wood, worked in the pork-houses where merchants prepared for the Southern market the fatted hogs which were the principal legal-tenders for the indebtedness of farmer customers, formed part of the crew of one of the many flatboats which conveyed the meat to market, and did whatever other work he could find. But in the winter season, when the family appetite was most industrious, Tom could not find employment for all his time, while the merchants who trusted him made more frequent requests for money than Tom was able to honor. When he was idle, he found himself more welcome at the liquor-shops than anywhere else; when he grew despondent at his inability to pay, he sought solace at these same places; when in the steady work and long hours of the summer season he became gradually “worked out” and “used up”—experiences not infrequent with Tom—he went to the liquor-shops for the only relief he had ever been able to find. His experience did not differ greatly from that of men of higher social standing, who, under similar mental and physical conditions, drink high-priced wines. He gradually increased the quantity of his potations, and went through the successive experiences of being unmanned by liquor, striving to rebuild himself by the power which had broken him, becoming by turns gay, silly, boisterous, pugnacious, sullen, apathetic, and finally penitent. Each of his sprees cost him several days in time and several dollars in money—a fact which no one realized more clearly than Tom himself; yet the feeling which had made him take the first drinks of these frightful series was one which had its seat in his own better nature, and which he had many times found more powerful than every influence he could bring to bear against it. He had listened to many a private lecture on the subject of his weakness, and had honestly admitted the truth of all that was said to him on the subject; he had signed many a pledge in the most agonized earnest, and had broken every one of them.

On the Monday which followed the temperance meeting Tom Adams was nearly frantic with his old longing. The rest of Sunday had been a hindrance rather than a help to him, for he had already suffered several days from the effects of abstaining from his usual after-dinner and after-supper potations. The amount usually drank on these occasions had not been great, but the habit had for some years been so regular that his amazed and indignant physique protested against the change. Had he been capable of spiritually withdrawing himself from the world on the day of the Lord, he might have found help and strength; but he was as incapable of such a thing as were nine-tenths of the church-members in Barton. While he remained at home, his children were noisy enough to have hurried a rapt seer back to the realization of earthly things; when he went abroad he could not, as was his usual Sunday habit, step quietly into the back door of Bayne’s liquor-store. He strolled down to the stable-yard of the Barton House, hoping to find some one with whom he could talk horse; but the hostler was not in sight, and the stable-boy, who had been heard to say he “didn’t count much on them fellers what signed the pledge and went back on their friends,” eyed him with evident disgust. In the street he met people going to and from church and Sunday-school, and they looked at him as if their eyes were asking, “Are you keeping your pledge?” Then, to crown all, his wife gave him such a beseeching and yet doubting look every time he left the house and returned to it that he almost hated the good woman for her affectionate anxiety.

Tom was up bright and early Monday morning, and though he soon mounted his wagon and left his wife’s eyes behind him, he found his longing for liquor as close to him as ever. Reaching the brick-yard, he was rather startled to find there Deacon Jones, his employer, and owner of a store as well as the kilns. The deacon looked at him as all the religious people had done on Sunday, and Tom inwardly cursed him.

“How are you, Tom?” inquired the deacon, and then, without waiting for a reply, remarked:

“There’s somethin’ I’ve been a-wantin’ to talk to you ’bout, Tom, an’ I was sure o’ catchin’ you here, so I came over before breakfast. You signed the pledge t’other night.”

This latter clause was delivered with an accompanying glance which caused Tom to put a great deal of anger into his reply, although his words were few.

“Yes, an’ kep’ it, too.”

“I’m glad of it, Tom. There’s been times when you didn’t, you know. Well, what I want to say is this: Some folks say that some men drink because they have to work too hard, an’ because they have trouble. Now, mebbe—I only say mebbe, mind—mebbe that’s what upset you those other times. Now, if I was to give you work all the year round at seventy-five cents a day, an’ not work you more’n ten hours a day, would it help you to keep straight?”

“Would it?” said Tom, scratching his head, wrinkling his brows, and eying the deacon incredulously “Why, of course it would.”

“Well, then,” said the deacon, “I’ll do it. As long as the brick business is good you can work at haulin’ from seven to twelve, an’ one to six. Don’t you s’pose you could put two or three hundred more brick on a load without hurtin’ the hosses? I don’t want to lose any more’n I can help, you know, by cuttin’ down your time. Rainy days I’ll keep you busy at the store some way; them’s the days farmers can’t do much on the farm, so they bring their butter and eggs to town, and there’s a sight of measurin’ an’ weighin’ to be done. An’ after the brick season’s over I’ll find you somethin’ to do at the store. You can put the pork-house an’ warehouse to rights before the packin’ season begins, an’ you can weigh the corn an’ wheat an’ oats an’ pork when they come in, and mend bags, and work in the pork-house three months out of the six. You wouldn’t object to takin’ night-spells in the pork-house instead of day-spells, would you, when we have to work day and night? Night-wages costs us most, you know, an’ you ought to help us make up what we lose on you when there’s nothin’ doin’.”

“Just as you say,” replied Tom. He did not clasp the deacon in a grateful embrace, for the deacon had, in his thrifty way, prevented Tom from feeling especially grateful. The owner of the brick-yard had intimated that the new arrangement was for Tom’s especial benefit, but his later remarks caused this feature of the arrangement to speedily disappear from view. But, although not doubting for an instant that the deacon meant to get his money back with usury, Tom felt his heart growing lighter every moment. At the same time he felt angry at the deacon’s occasional suggestions that the arrangements were partly of the nature of charity. So he replied:

“Just as you say; but, deacon, I ain’t the feller that wants money for work I don’t do, you know that. The arrangement suits me first-rate, but I’m goin’ to work hard for my money; you can bet all your loose change on that.”

“Thomas!” ejaculated the deacon sternly, “I am not in the habit of betting. It’s a careless, foolish, wasteful, sinful way of using money.”

“That’s so,” replied Tom reflectively; “unless,” he continued, “you’re one of the winnin’ kind.”

“It is a business I don’t intend to go into, so the less said of it the better. So my offer suits you, does it?”

“I’ll shake hands on it,” replied Tom, extending his hand.

“Wait a moment,” said the deacon, retiring his own right hand to a conservative position behind his back. “If it suits you,” continued the deacon impressively, “you agree to stick to your pledge; no foolin’ with whisky again, mind.”

“Nary drop,” said Tom, with great emphasis. “Ten minutes ago I wouldn’t have given a pewter dime for my chance of sticking it out through the day, but now I wouldn’t give a cent for a barr’l full of ten-year-old rye.”

“All right, then—shake hands. And we begin to-day—or say to-morrow—there’s lots of bricks wanted to-day—here’s the orders. And may the Lord help you, Thomas—help you to hold out steadfast unto the end. Now I reckon I’ll get home to breakfast.”

As the deacon walked off he soliloquized in this manner:

“There! I wonder if that’ll suit Crupp an’ Brother Wedgewell? What a queer team them two fellows make! Queer that Crupp should have bothered me two hours Saturday night, an’ the preacher should have come out so strong about bein’ our brothers’ keepers the very next day. ’Twas a Christian act for me to do, too. ‘He that converteth a sinner from the error of his ways’—ah! blessed be the promises. An’ I won’t lose a cent by the operation—I can keep him busy enough. When folks know what I’ve done an’ what I done it for, I guess they’ll think I’ve got my good streaks after all. I declare, I ought to have told him I couldn’t pay for days when he was sick; ’tain’t too late yet, though—he won’t back out on that account. Mebbe I can talk him into j’ining the church, too—who knows, an’ some day in ’xperience meetin’ mebbe he’ll tell how it all came about through me. He must bring his dinners with him when he’s workin’ about the store. I ought to have done that with my clerk before he took to lunchin’ off the crackers and cheese busy days—these little things all cost. But it does make a man feel good to do kindnesses to his fellow-men.”

As for Tom Adams, he mounted the wagon, seized the reins, and exclaimed,

“By thunder! ’fore I haul a durned brick, I’ll just drive home by the back way and tell the old woman. Reckon she won’t look at me any more in that way then. Like enough he’s right when he says some says mebbe workin’ too hard makes fellows drink. It never got into my head before, though.”

As Tom drove through a back street in which Mr. Crupp lived, that worthy stared at the empty wagon inquiringly.

“The old man’s engaged me for a year, at six bits a day, and only ten hours a day to work,” shouted Tom in explanation.

“The devil!” replied the new reformer, and seizing his hat he hurried off to the Rev. Jonas Wedgewell. The pastor was discovered through an open window at his matutinal repast, and the eager Crupp thrust his head in the window and shouted,

“First blood, parson! Old Jones has hired Tom for a year, and he’s only got ten hours a day to work.”

The holy man raised his hands, despite the incumbrances of half a biscuit and a coffee cup, and exclaimed,

“Bless the Lord for the first fruits of the seed so newly sown. Who would have thought so undemonstrative a man would have been the first to heed the word of exhortation?”

“He’s the first to see money in it—that’s why,” explained Crupp.

“My dear sir, do you really ascribe Deacon Jones’s meritorious action to sordid motives?” asked the old pastor, opening his mouth and eyes as if the answer for which he waited was to come through them.

“Hum—well, no—I reckon ’twas a little mixed,” replied Mr. Crupp, meditatively analyzing a blossom of a honeysuckle growing by the pastor’s window. “I dinged at him, you preached at him, he thought it over, and whatever Jonathan Jones thinks over long is pretty sure to have money in it somewhere in the end. He’ll make mor’n he’ll lose on Tom, an’ it’s best he should—he’ll have a better heart to try another experiment of the same sort one of these days. But I didn’t mean to interrupt your breakfast—beg your pardon, Mrs. Wedgewell and young ladies, for not ringing the bell, but I was too full of the news to behave myself. Good by.”

And Mr. Crupp started for his own breakfast-table, while the Reverend Jonas’s eyes seemed directed at some object just out of sight, as he abstractedly raised his coffee cup to his lips.

CHAPTER V.
AN ASTONISHED VIRGINIAN.

Why old Bunley had made Barton his place of residence nobody knew. The most plausible theory ever advanced on the subject came from the former proprietor of the Barton House, who said that Bunley, happening to be traveling that way, had found the brandy at the Barton House so good that he hadn’t the heart to leave it. The brandy lasted so long that old Bunley—then twenty years younger—while consuming it became acquainted with nearly everybody in the town; and as he had no engagements that restrained him from making himself agreeable, he found himself well liked, and entreated to make his home at Barton. He reported—and his report was afterward verified—that he was the son of a Virginia planter, and was unpopular at home because he had made a runaway match with a splendid girl, whose only fault was that her family did not rank very high. Bunley’s father had cut his son off with a thousand dollars, but had considerately sent the money with the letter of dismissal; so the happy couple were leisurely spending the money and waiting for the old gentleman to relent, as irate fathers always do in books. But while Bunley was enjoying the hospitalities of Barton, annoyed only by the fact that his purse was growing light, he heard of his father’s sudden death and of the inheritance by an unloving brother of the entire estate. Then the young bridegroom attempted to obtain money by borrowing, for this was the only method of money-getting he understood; but the small success which attended his efforts did not pay for the annoyance which his soulless creditors gave him. Then he tried gambling, and, by devoting his mind to it, succeeded so well that no one but an occasional commercial traveler, to whom Bunley’s ways were unknown, would play with him. Then, under the guise of being clerk of the Barton House, he became its actual barkeeper, and attracted so much custom away from the other liquor-sellers that the grateful proprietor took him into partnership, and, dying a year later, bequeathed the whole business to him. But the good brandy which had first persuaded Bunley to stop at Barton continued its fascinations, and the new proprietor of the Barton House, while liked by all travelers, grew so unpopular with purveyors of flour, meat, and other hotel necessities that the sheriff was finally called upon to settle the differences between them by disposing of the hotel property at auction.

After that Bunley ran to seed, to use an expression common in Barton. How he lived during the twenty years which followed was not well understood. His wife died, and it was understood that he married some money the second time; but it was none the less whispered about town that Bunley had been seen at night to borrow at woodpiles whose owners he had not consulted. He went upon mighty sprees, and carried the bouquet of liquor wherever he went. He started a small groggery of his own, in which many bright boys learned to drink. He had long since ruined the credit which he obtained on the strength of his second wife’s property, for he never paid an account.

And yet the most aggrieved of Bunley’s creditors could not help being soft-hearted when they saw the old man in church, as he was every Sunday morning with his two boys. The gentleman which was in old Bunley then showed itself in his face and manner, and it did seem too bad that any one who could look and act so much like a man should not be trusted to the extent of a dollar’s worth of sugar or a hundred pounds of flour. Squire Tomple had thought so one Sunday, and as the Squire strove to keep worldly thoughts out of his mind on the Lord’s day, his mind became filled with old Bunley—so much so, that on the following Monday he decoyed Bunley into his store, and talked so pleasantly to him that the old gentleman actually made the request for which the Squire hoped. He bought rather more than the Squire had meant to sell him on credit, but his promise of early payment was so distinct and emphatic that the Squire’s doubt was not fairly established for many months. This story in all its details was told by the Squire to Mr. Crupp, after that gentleman announced to him that something should be done for old Bunley.

“That was because you didn’t go about the job in the right way,” said Crupp. “He’s got just enough conceit to suppose that he’s going to pay all his bills some day, and he feels that when the time comes your profit’ll pay for your kindness. That conceit of his is just what needs to be taken down—it’s got to be done kindly—so that he understands that whatever he gets comes out of pure charity and the desire to make him comfortable, even at a loss. Now, he and his little family can live on about a dollar a day. I’ll stand half the expense of supporting him for three months if you’ll do the other half, and we’ll talk plain, good-natured English to him, and let him understand he’s a pauper. That’ll put him on his mettle. What do you say?”

The Squire looked grave at once—as grave as he had appeared when an uninsured hogshead of sugar belonging to him had fallen from a steamboat gang-plank into the river, and melted. The proposition seemed to take his breath away, in fact; but in a moment or two he regained it.

“Look here, Crupp,” said he, “temperance is all very well; but I don’t think it’s my business to stand part of the expenses of reforming everybody, when I haven’t had anything to do with making drunkards. With you the case is different. You say your liquors were always good; but, like enough, that made men all the fonder of drinking the infernal things. You’re a public-spirited citizen, but you can’t deny that you’ve had a thousand times more to do with making drunkards than I have. The very fact that you are a decent fellow yourself has made drinking halfway respectable in Barton. The crime’s right at your own door, and you ought to pay for it. You——”

The Squire paused. Mr. Crupp’s face was very white and his teeth were tightly set. Mr. Crupp had been known to throw a disorderly visitor at his bar halfway across the street; and although the Squire knew that his own avoirdupois was too great to be treated so contemptuously, he had no desire to feel the weight of Crupp’s fist. Besides, Crupp was a customer who bought a great deal and paid promptly, and the Squire did not like to offend him and lose his custom. So the Squire paused.

“Go right on,” said Mr. Crupp very quietly. “I’ll not bear any malice. I’ve said a great many worse things to myself. Don’t hold in anything you’ve got on your mind.”

“I’m done,” said the Squire, looking relieved and extending his hand. “Crupp, I think a good deal of you, and I’m ashamed of myself for boiling over as I did. But folks talk to me as if I was made of money. I paid out a good deal on the expense of the meeting; the parson’s been at me to help every lazy drunkard to get work; George Doughty wants more pay or less work, so he won’t have such a hankering after liquor; and now to be asked to help old Bunley, that’s owed me money a long time and never paid it, that came near helping one of my boys to a taste for liquor, that helps himself at my woodpile—it’s too much, that’s all.”

“Squire,” said Crupp, “isn’t there something in your Bible that’s not complimentary to men who say to the needy, ‘Depart: be ye warmed and fed,’ but don’t put their hands into their pockets to help the poor wretches along? I tell you that a man that’s got the love of drink fixed in every muscle in his body and every drop of his blood is worse off than any cold and hungry man you ever saw. Such men sometimes help themselves out of their trouble, and stick to cold water; but the man that does it is more of a hero, and he’s got better stuff in him, than any other sort of sinner that ever repents. He’s got to be helped just like drowning men have to be, and you’ve got to take hold of him just as you do of a drowning man, by whatever part you can get the tightest grip on. Bunley’s pride’s the only handle you can find on him, and you can’t get at that except by showing that you think enough of him to sink money in him.”

The Squire cast about in his mind for some argument in defense of his money; but, as he found none, he acted like a good diplomatist, and started to talk against time by uttering some promising generalizations.

“I always meant, and I still mean,” said he, “to do good with my money. That’s what it was given me for. I’m only the Lord’s steward——”

“And right here in Barton is where the Lord put you to do it,” said Crupp. “Here’s where you made your money; here are the people who know you and don’t suspect you of caring any less for your money than other folks do for theirs; here are the people you know all about; you know their weaknesses and their good points, and every dollar you spend on them you can watch, and see that it does its duty.”

“When I know that helping a man will be sure to reform him,” began the Squire, when again his companion interrupted him:

“Did you ever read of Christ’s letting a man suffer for fear that if he cured him or fed him he might get sick or hungry again? If I read straight, he helped everybody that came to him, and everybody that needed help. I suppose loafers were as thick in Judæa as they are in Barton; why, when he healed those ten lepers there was only one of them decent enough to come back and say “Thank you.” I’ve got money enough to take Bunley on my own shoulders for a little while, and I’m going to spend a good deal on such fellows; but they want to see that they’re thought something of by men who never sold whisky, who never made anything out of them, who are enough in earnest to do something for them that costs more than talk does. I know it isn’t easy, but it’s got to be done—that is, if Christianity is true.”

Crupp’s last shot told. Squire Tomple was orthodox, but he was not without reflective capacity, and many had been his twinges of conscience at his practical rejection of undoubted deductions which he had drawn from Christ’s teachings and example. But on this particular occasion, as on many others, he was not defeated; he was only temporarily demoralized. In a moment he was on the defensive again, and suddenly raised his head and opened his lips; but, whatever his idea was, it remained unspoken; for in the eye of Crupp, which had been intently scrutinizing his face and through it his heart, he detected a softness and haziness unusual in the eyes of men. The Squire, not without a struggle, became at once shamefaced and obedient, and said hurriedly,

“Crupp, you’re a good, square man; I’m proud to know you, and I’ll do what you like—for old Bunley, that is.”

Great was the surprise of Bunley himself, when he answered a knock at his door a few minutes later, to find Squire Tomple and Mr. Crupp upon his front stoop, both of them looking and acting as if extremely embarrassed. But old Bunley never forgot his Virginia breeding, not even before a couple of creditors; so he invited both gentlemen to seats on the top step, and then sat down between them.

The Squire looked appealingly at Crupp; Crupp winked encouragingly at the Squire; the Squire coughed feebly; Crupp plucked a stem of timothy grass, and gazed at it as if he had never seen such a thing before; the Squire took out a pocket-knife, and began to scrape his finger-nails, and then Crupp remarked that it was a fine day. Bunley having cheerfully assented to this expression of opinion, there was a moment or two of awkward silence, which was finally relieved by Bunley, who drew from his pocket a plug of tobacco, from which he took a bite, after first offering it to his visitors. A little more facial pantomime went on between Tomple and Crupp, and then the Squire spoke.

“Bunley,” said he, “you don’t seem to get along very fast in the world.”

“That’s a fact,” answered Bunley with hearty emphasis. “Luck seems to go against me, no matter how I lay myself out. There ain’t a man in this town that wants to do the right thing any more than I do, but somehow I don’t get the chance. I signed the pledge t’other night at the meetin’; but how I’m goin’ to stick to it, with all the trouble I’m in, is more than I can see through.”

“We’ve come down to help you do it,” said the Squire.

“To help you with money—not talk,” supplemented Crupp.

Bunley looked at both men quickly, from under the extreme inner edge of his upper eyelid.

“We propose, between us, to show you that we’re in dead earnest to help you keep the pledge,” continued the Squire. “We’re going to give you, week after week, whatever you need to live on for the next three months, so you won’t have any excuse for drinking to drown trouble, and so you’ll have a chance to find something to do.”

Old Bunley sprang to his feet. “Gentlemen,” said he, “you’re—you’re gentlemen. It’s the first time in my life that anybody ever cared that much for me, though. You shan’t lose anything by it, I promise you that; I’ll pay you back again the first chance I get to make anything.”

“We don’t want it back,” said Crupp. “We won’t take it back. We want to give it to you, out and out——”

“To show you that it’s you that we’re interested in, not ourselves,” interrupted the Squire.

Then Old Virginia came to the surface again; Bunley seemed to grow an inch or two, and to swell several more as he replied,

“I’m not a pauper, gentlemen.”

“Certainly not,” said the Squire hastily; “but you can’t pay your debts nor your current expenses, and Crupp and I are a little ahead in the world, and willing to give you a hundred, say—a little at a time.”

“You’ve got a couple of boys to bring up, you know, Bunley,” suggested Crupp.

“And they ought to go among the best people, too,” said the Squire. “You came of a good family——”

“And their mother was a lady, too—every inch of her!” exclaimed Bunley.

“Of course she was,” said Crupp. “But, to come back to business, we don’t want you to have any excuse to touch whisky again, and we want you to live on us for the next three months as a personal favor. After that, if you make any money, I s’pose the Squire’ll be glad to sell you anything he keeps in his store; I know I will, if I’m in business then. But you mustn’t talk about paying now, ’cause it’s all nonsense. Come up to the Squire’s store when you want anything. Good-by.”

Bunley drew himself up with great solemnity and old-time courtesy as he shook hands with both men. When his visitors reached the friendly angle of an old, abandoned barn, both turned hastily, gazed through cracks between the boards, and saw the old man sitting in a meditative attitude, with his lower jaw in both his hands.

“Don’t that look good?” whispered Crupp, his face all animation.

“It does that,” replied the Squire; “there’s no dodging the question; it does look good.”

CHAPTER VI.
A COURSE NEVER SMOOTH.

On a pleasant August evening, at that particular portion of the day in which twilight shades into night, Fred Macdonald left his father’s house and walked toward the opposite portion of the village. From his leisurely, elastic gait, the artistic effect of his necktie, the pose of his hat, the rose-bud in his button-hole, and the graceful carriage of his cane, it was very evident that Frederick’s steps did not tend toward the fulfillment of any prosaic business engagement. It was not so dark that he could not recognize, in occasional unlighted windows, certain faces well known, some of them handsome, all of them pleasing; nor was it too dark, just after Fred had bestowed a bow and a smile upon the occupant of each of these windows, and passed on, for one to discern, by the expressions upon most of the faces that slowly turned and looked after the young man, that Fred need not have gone farther in search of a cordial welcome. But he walked on until he reached the residence of the Rev. Jonas Wedgewell. To any one not a resident of Barton the house might have seemed a strange one to be visited by a young man fond of liquor and the company frequently found on Western steamboats; and the stranger’s surprise might have increased, at finding that Fred had been so frequent a visitor that even the house itself seemed glad to see him, and that the heavy old door seemingly opened of its own accord, before Fred’s fingers had time to touch its antique knocker. But had the supposititious observer possessed good eyes, whose actual powers were temporarily increased by the stimulus of curiosity, his bewilderment would have ended a second later; for, as Fred stepped inside the hall, there came from behind the door a small hand, and then a dainty ruffle, and then a muslin sleeve, and these all took their direction toward the shoulder of Fred’s coat; while there followed a profile which the beholder would have willingly gazed upon longer, had it not almost instantaneously disappeared behind that side of Fred’s face which was farthest from the door.

Could the observer’s gaze have penetrated the window shades of Parson Wedgewell’s little parlor, he would have seen a face, not girlish or of regular features, and yet so full of happiness that its effect was that of absolute beauty and the innocence of youth. There were estimable maidens in Barton who, scorning the thought that they could be either jealous or envious, had frequently remarked to their intimates that they could not see what men found in Esther Wedgewell to rave about, and it was well known that the mystery had never been satisfactorily explained to such young ladies as had become the wives of men who had been among Miss Esther’s admirers. It is even to be doubted whether Fred Macdonald himself could have verbally elucidated the matter; there have been such cases where long and joyous lifetimes have not sufficed in which to frame such an explanation, and when the person most blessed has had to journey into another world in search of adequate power of expression. Ordinarily Esther Wedgewell was a young lady the pleasantness of whose face did not hide the fact that its owner’s forehead was too high, the nose too short, the mouth too large, and the complexion too pale for perfect beauty. But somehow young men noticed first of all Miss Esther’s eyes, and these, though neither of heavenly blue, nor violet, nor the brownness of nuts, nor large, nor melting, but only plain gray, were so honest in themselves, and so sympathetic for others, that no one of any character cared to gaze from them to any other of the young woman’s features.

What Fred and Esther said to each other during the first few minutes after their meeting, was of a nature which never shows to full advantage in print; besides, it was in the nature of things that they should say very little. In spite of the experience accumulated during a hundred or more of just such meetings, it seemed necessary that a few minutes should be consumed by Fred in assuring himself that it was really Esther who sat in the rocking-chair in front of him; and the same time was used by the lady in determining that the handsome, intelligent face in front of her was that of the only lover she had ever accepted. Gradually, however, the sentences spoken by the couple became longer and more frequent; their subjects were ordinary enough; being the mutual acquaintances they had met during the day; the additions which had been made to the embroidery on the pair of slippers which Esther, after the manner of most other betrothed maidens in America, had begun to make for her lover; the quality of the singing in church on the preceding Sunday; the latest news from Captain Hall’s expedition to the North Pole; the character of Shakespeare’s Portia; and yet one would have supposed, from the countenances of both of these young people, that in each of these topics there was some underlying motive of the most delightful import; while their remarks seemed to indicate that there was but one side to either of the subjects discussed, and that both Fred and Esther saw it with the extreme clearness of earthly comprehension.

Then, in a lull in the conversation, Fred asked, with a courtesy and minuteness inherited from aristocratic parents, about Mr. and Mrs. Wedgewell, and elicited the information that Esther’s father was composing a second sermon on intemperance.

“Your father undoubtedly is himself the best judge of the needs of his congregation,” said Fred, dropping his eyes a little and playing with a bit of paper; “but I can’t help feeling that he is wasting his fine talents in preaching on intemperance. If his sermons could be heard and applied by the proper persons, they might do a great deal of good; but what drunkard goes to church? Only moderate drinkers and people who don’t drink at all ever hear your father’s sermons, and none of them have any need for such instructions.”

Esther brushed an imaginary thread or mote from her dress, and said, with some embarrassment,

“Father believes that the moderate drinkers are those who most need to be warned.”

“Why, Ettie!” exclaimed Fred, “how can he believe that? He must know that I occasionally—that is, he knows that I am not one of the Sons of Temperance; yet he gave me you”—here conversation ceased a moment as Fred stepped toward Esther, conveying unto that lady an affectionate testimonial whose exact nature will be understood—“and he certainly would not have done so had he supposed I was in any danger of being injured by liquor.”

Esther did not wait even until she had finished rearranging a disordered tress or two to reply.

“He said ‘yes,’ only after I told him of your promise to me that you would not drink any more after we were married. He said you were the best born and best bred young man he had ever met—as if I didn’t already know it, you dear boy—but that he would rather bury me than let me marry a drinking man.”

During the delivery of this short speech Fred looked by turns astonished, sober, flattered, sullen, indignant, and finally business-like and judicial. Then he said:

“Darling, you must let me believe that your father is not fully posted about men who take an occasional glass. It’s no fault of his; he probably never tasted a drop of liquor in his life—he may never have felt the need of it. But believe me when I tell you that many of the smartest men drink sometimes, and are greatly helped by it. A business man whose daily life can’t help being often irregular, sometimes finds he can’t get along without something to help him through the day. Why, a few days ago I helped Sam Crayme, captain of the “Excellence,” you know, at a difficult bit of business; I worked thirty-six hours on a stretch, and made fifty dollars by it. That’s more money than any of your young temperance men of Barton ever make in a month, but I never could have done it if it hadn’t been for an occasional drink.”

“But,” said Esther, “you know I don’t say it by way of complaint, Fred dear, but for a week after that you felt dull and didn’t say much, and didn’t care to read, and one evening when I expected you you didn’t come.”

“But think how tired a man must be after such a job, Ettie,” pleaded Fred in an injured tone.

“You poor old fellow, I know it,” said Esther; “but you wouldn’t have been so if you hadn’t done the work, and you yourself say you couldn’t have done the work if you hadn’t drunk the liquor, and you know you didn’t need the money so badly as to have had to do so much. Any merchant in the town would be glad to give you employment at which you would be your own natural self.”

“And I would always be a poor man if I worked for our plodding, small-paying merchants,” said Fred. “Why, Ettie, who own the handsomest houses in town, who have the best horses, who set the best tables, whose wives and children wear the best clothes? Why, Moshier and Brown and Crayme and Wainright, every one of them moderate drinkers; I never in my life saw one of them drunk.”

“And I would rather be dead than be the wife of any one of them,” said Esther with an energy which startled Fred. “Mrs. Moshier used to be such a happy-looking woman, and now she is so quiet and has such sad eyes. Brown seems to spend no end of money on his family; but his children are always put to bed before he comes home, because he is as likely as not to be cross and unkind to them; when they meet him on the street they never shout ‘Papa!’ and rush up to him as your little brothers and sisters do to your father; but they look at him first with an anxious look that’s enough to break one’s heart, and as likely as not cross the street to avoid meeting him. Mrs. Crayme was having such a pleasant time at Nellie Wainright’s party the other night, when her husband, who she seldom enough has a chance to take into society with her, said such silly things and stared around with such an odd look in his eye that she made some excuse to take him home. And Nellie Wainright—she was my particular friend before she was married, you know—was here a few days ago, and I was telling her how happy I was, when suddenly she threw both arms around my neck and burst out crying, and told me that she hoped that my husband would never drink after I was married. She insists upon it that her husband is the best man that ever lived, and that if she only mentions anything she would like, she has it at once if money can buy it, and yet she is unhappy. She says there’s always a load on her heart, and though she feels real wicked about it, she can’t get rid of it.”

Fred Macdonald was unable for some moments to reply to this unexpected speech; he arose from his chair, and walked slowly up and down the room, with his hands behind him, and with the countenance natural to a man who has heard something of which he had previously possessed no idea. Esther looked at him, first furtively, then tenderly; then she sprang to his side and leaned upon his shoulder, saying,

“Dear Fred, I know you could never be that way; but then all these women were sure they knew just the same about their lovers, before they were married.”

“Well, Ettie,” said Fred, passing an arm about the young lady, “I really don’t know what’s to be done about it, if drinking moderately is the cause of all these dreadful things; I’m bound to be somebody; I’m in the set of men that make money; they like me, and I understand them. But they all take something, and you don’t know how they look at a man who refuses to drink with them; all of them think he don’t amount to much, and some of them actually feel insulted. What is a fellow to do?”

“Go into some other set, I suppose,” said Esther very soberly.

“You don’t know what you’re saying, my dear girl,” said Fred. “What else is there for a man to do in a dead-and-alive place like Barton? you don’t want to be the wife of a four-hundred-dollar clerk, and live in part of a common little house, do you?”

“Yes,” said Esther, showing her lover a rapturous face whose attractiveness was not marred by a suspicion of shyness. “I do, if Fred Macdonald is to be my husband.”

“Then if either of us should have a long illness, or if I should lose my position, we would have to depend on your parents and mine,” said Fred.

“Let us wait, then,” said Esther, “until you can have saved something, before we are married.”

“And be like Charley Merrick and Kate Armstrong, who’ve been engaged for ten years, and are growing old and doleful about it.”

“I’ll never grow old and doleful while waiting for my lover to succeed,” said Esther, in a tone which might have carried conviction with it had Fred been entirely in a listening humor. But as Fred imagined himself in the position of the many unsuccessful young men in Barton, and of the anxious-looking husbands who had once been as spirited as himself, he fell into a frame of mind which was anything but receptive. In his day-dreams marriage had seemed made up of many things beside the perpetual companionship of Esther: it had among its very desirable components a handsome, well-furnished house, a carriage of the most approved style, an elegant wardrobe for Esther, and one of faultless style for himself, a prominent pew in church, and, not least of all, a sideboard which should be better stocked than that of any of his friends. To banish these from his mind for a moment, and imagine himself living in two or three rooms; cheapening meat at the butcher’s; never driving out but when he could borrow somebody’s horse and antiquated buggy; wearing a suit of clothes for two or three years in succession, while Esther should spend hours in making over and over the dresses of her unmarried days; all this made him almost deaf to Esther’s loyal words, and nearly oblivious to the fact that the wisest and sweetest girl in Barton was resting within his arm. Suddenly he aroused himself from his revery, and exclaimed, in a tone which Esther did not at first recognize as his own,

“Ettie, your ideas are honest and lofty, but you must admit that I know best about matters of business. I can’t deliberately throw away everything I have done, and form entirely different business connections. I’ve always regretted my promise to stop drinking after our marriage; but I’ve trusted that you, with your unusual sense, would see the propriety of absolving me from it.”

Esther shrank away from Fred, and hid her face in her hands, whispering hoarsely,

“I can’t. I can’t, and I never will.”

She dropped into a chair and burst into tears. Fred’s momentary expression of anger softened into sorrow, but his business instinct did not desert him. “Ettie,” said he tenderly, “I thought you trusted me.”

“You know I do, Fred,” said the weeping girl; “but my lover and the Fred who drinks are two different persons, and I can’t trust the latter. Don’t think me selfish: be always your natural self, and there’s no poverty or sorrow that I won’t endure to be always with you. Do you think I hope to marry you for the sake of living in luxury, or that any pleasures that money will buy will satisfy me any more than they do Nellie Wainright and Mr. Moshier’s wife? Or do you, professing to love me, ask me to run even the slightest risk of ever being as unhappy as the poor women we have been talking about are with their husbands, who love them dearly? You must keep that promise, or I must love you apart from you—until you marry some one else! Even then I could only stop, it seems to me, by stopping to live.”

Fred’s face, while Esther was speaking, was anything but comely to look upon, but his intended reply was prevented by a violent knock at the door. Esther hurriedly dried her eyes, and prepared to vanish, if necessary, while Fred regained in haste his ordinary countenance; then, as the servant opened the door, the lovers heard a voice saying,

“Is Fred Macdonald here? He must come down to George Doughty’s right away. George is dying!”

Fred gave Ettie a hasty kiss and a conciliatory caress, after which he left the house at a lively run.

CHAPTER VII.
SOME NATURAL RESULTS.

George Doughty lay propped up in bed; standing beside him, and clasping his hand tightly, was his wife; near him were his two oldest children, seemingly as ignorant of what was transpiring as they were uncomfortable on account of the peculiar influence which pervaded the room. On the other side of the bed, and holding one of the dying man’s hands, knelt Parson Wedgewell; beside him stood the doctor; while behind them both, near the door, and as nearly invisible as a man of his size could be, was Squire Tomple. The Squire’s face and figure seemed embodiments of a trembling, abject apology; he occasionally looked toward the door, as if to question that inanimate object whether behind its broad front he, the Squire, might not be safe from his own fears. It was very evident that the Squire’s conscience was making a coward of him; but it was also evident, and not for the first time in the world’s history, that cowardice is mightily influential in holding a coward to the ground that he hates. Had any one spoken to him, or paid him the slightest attention, the Squire would have felt better; nothing turns cowards into soldiers so quickly as the receipt of a volley; but no such relief seemed at all likely to reach him. The doctor, like a true man, having done all things, could only stand, and stand he did; Parson Wedgewell, feeling that upon his own efforts with the Great Physician depended the sick man’s future well-being, prayed silently and earnestly, raising his head only to search, through his tears, the face of the patient for signs of the desired answer to prayer. Mrs. Doughty was interested only in looking into the eyes too soon to close forever, and the faces of the two children were more than a man could intentionally look upon a second time. So when Doughty’s baby, who had been creeping about the floor, suddenly beholding the glories of the great seal which depended from the Squire’s fob-chain, tried to climb the leg of the storekeeper’s trousers, the Squire smiled, as a saint in extremity might smile at the sudden appearance of an angel, and he stooped—no easy operation for a man of Squire Tomple’s bulk—and, lifting the little fellow in his arms, put kisses all over the tiny face, which, in view of the relations of cleanliness to attractiveness, was not especially bewitching. A moment later, however, a muffled but approaching step brought back to the Squire his own sense of propriety, and he dropped the baby just in time to be able to give a hand to Fred Macdonald, as that young man softly pushed open the door. The Squire’s face again became apologetic.

“How did it happen?” whispered Fred.

“Why,” replied the Squire, “the doctor says it’s a galloping consumption; I never knew a thing about it. Doctor says it’s the quickest case he ever knew; he never imagined anything was the matter with George. If I’d known anything about it, I’d have had the doctor attending him long ago; but George isn’t of the complaining kind. The idea of a fellow being at work for me, and dying right straight along. Why, it’s awful! He says he never knew anything about it himself, so I don’t see how I could. He was at the store up to four or five days ago, then his wife came around one morning and told me that he didn’t feel fit to work that day, but she didn’t say what the matter was. I’ve been thinking, for two or three weeks, about giving him some help in the store; but you know how business drives everything out of a man’s head. First I thought I’d stay around the store myself evenings, and let George rest; but I’ve had to go to lodge meetings and prayer meetings, and my wife’s wanted me to go out with her, and so my time’s been taken up. Then I thought I’d get a boy, and—well, I didn’t know exactly which to do; but if I’d known——”

“But can’t something be done to brace him up for a day or two?” interrupted Fred; “then I’ll take him out driving every day, and perhaps he’ll pick up.”

The Squire looked twenty years older for a moment or two as he replied,

“The doctor says he hasn’t any physique to rally upon; he’s all gone, muscle, blood, and everything. It’s the queerest thing I ever knew; he hasn’t had anything to do, these past few years, but just what I did when I was a young man.”

The dying man turned his eyes inquiringly, and asked in a very thin voice,

“Isn’t Fred here?”

Fred started from the Squire’s side, but the storekeeper arrested his progress with both hands, and fixing his eyes on Fred’s necktie, whispered,

“You don’t think I’m to blame, do you?”

“Why—no—I don’t see how, exactly,” said Fred, endeavoring to escape.

“Fred,” whispered the Squire, tightening his hold on the lapels of Fred’s coat, “tell him so, won’t you? I’ll be your best friend forever if you will; it’s dreadful to think of a man going up to God with such an idea on his mind, even if it is a mistake. Of course, when he gets there he’ll find out he’s wrong, if he is, as——”

Fred broke away from the storekeeper, and wedged himself between the doctor and pastor. Doughty withdrew his wrist from the doctor’s fingers, extended a thin hand, and smiled.

“Fred,” said he, “we used to be chums when we were boys. I never took an advantage of you, did I?”

“Never,” said Fred; “and we’ll have lots of good times again, old fellow. I’ve just bought the best spring wagon in the State, and I’ll drive you all over the country when you get well enough.”

George’s smile became slightly grim as he replied,

“I guess Barker’s hearse is the only spring wagon I’ll ever ride in again, my boy.”

“Nonsense, George!” exclaimed Fred heartily. “How many times have I seen you almost dead, and then put yourself together again? Don’t you remember the time when you gave out in the middle of the river, and then picked yourself up, and swam the rest of the way? Don’t you remember the time we got snowed in on Raccoon Mountain, and we both gave up and got ready to die, and how you not only came to, but dragged me home besides? The idea of you ever dying! I wish you’d sent for me when you first took the silly notion into your head.”

Doughty was silent for a moment; his eyes brightened a little and a faint flush came to his cheeks; he looked fondly at his wife, and then at his children; he tried to raise himself in his bed; but in a minute his smile departed, his pallor returned, and he said, in the thinnest of voices,

“It’s no use, Fred; in those days there was something in me to call upon at a pinch; now there isn’t a thing. I haven’t any time to spare, Fred; what I want to ask is, keep an eye on my boys, for old acquaintance’ sake. Their mother will be almost everything to them, but she can’t be expected to know about their ways among men. I want somebody to care enough for them to see that they don’t make the mistakes I’ve made.”

A sudden rustle and a heavy step was heard, and Squire Tomple approached the bedside, exclaiming,

“I’ll do that!”

“Thank you, Squire,” said George feebly; “but you’re not the right man to do it.”

“George,” said the Squire, raising his voice, and unconsciously raising his hand, “I’ll give them the best business chances that can be had; I can do it, for I’m the richest man in this town.”

“You gave me the best chance in town, Squire, and this is what has come of it,” said Doughty.

The Squire precipitately fell back and against his old place by the wall. Doughty continued,

“Fred, persuade them—tell them that I said so—that a business that makes them drink to keep up, isn’t business at all—it’s suicide. Tell them that their father, who was never drunk in his life, got whisky to help him use more of himself, until there wasn’t anything left to use. Tell them that drinking for strength means discounting the future, and that discounting the future always means getting ready for bankruptcy.”

“I’ll do it, old fellow,” said Fred, who had been growing very solemn of visage.

“They shan’t ask you for any money, Fred, explained Doughty, when the Squire’s voice was again heard saying,

“And they shan’t refuse it from me.”

“Thank you, Squire,” said George. “I do think you owe it to them, but I guess they’ve good enough stuff in them to refuse it.”

“George,” said the Squire, again approaching the bedside, “I’m going to continue your salary to your wife until your boys grow big enough to help her. You know I’ve got plenty of money—’twon’t hurt me; for God’s sake make her promise to take it.”

“She won’t need it,” said Doughty. “My life’s insured.”

“Then what can I do for her—for them—for you?” asked the Squire. “George, you’re holding your—sickness—against me, and I want to make it right. I can’t say I believe I’ve done wrong by you, but you think I have, and that’s enough to make me want to restore good feeling between us before—in case anything should happen. Anything that money can do, it shall do.”

“Offer it to God Almighty, Squire, and buy my life back again,” said Doughty. “If you can’t do that, your money isn’t good for anything in this house.”

The doctor whispered to his patient that he must not exert himself so much; the Squire whispered to the doctor to know what else a man in his own position could do?

Fred Macdonald could think of no appropriate expression with which to break the silence that threatened. Suddenly Parson Wedgewell raised his head, and said,

“My dear young friend, this is a solemn moment. There are others who know and esteem you, beside those here present; have you no message to leave for them? Thousands of people rightly regard you as a young man of high character, and your influence for good may be powerful among them. I should esteem it an especial privilege to announce, in my official capacity, such testimony as you may be moved to make, and as your pastor, I feel like claiming this mournful pleasure as a right. What may I say?”

“Say,” replied the sick man, with an earnestness which was almost terrible in its intensity; “say that whisky was the best business friend I ever found, and that when it began to abuse me, no one thought enough of me to step in between us. And tell them that this story is as true as it is ugly.”

As Doughty spoke, he had raised himself upon one elbow; as he uttered his last word, he dropped upon his pillow, and passed into a land to which no one but his wife manifested any willingness to follow him.

CHAPTER VIII.
AN ESTIMABLE ORGANIZATION CRITICISED.

The funeral services of George Doughty were as largely attended as the great temperance meeting had been, and the attendants admitted—although the admission was not, logically, of particular force—that they received the worth of their money. The pall-bearers, twelve in number, were all young men who had been in the habit of drinking, but who had signed the pledge, some of them having appended signatures to special pledges privately prepared on the evening before the service. The funeral anthem was as doleful as the most sincere mourner could have wished, the music having been composed especially for the occasion by the chorister of Mr. Wedgewell’s church. As for the sermon, it was universally voted the most powerful effort that Parson Wedgewell had ever made. Day and night had the good man striven with Doughty’s parting injunction, determined to transmit the exact spirit of it, but horrified at its verbal form. At last he honestly made George’s own words the basis of his whole sermon; his method being, first, to show what would have been naturally the last words of a young man of good birth and Christian breeding, and then presenting George’s moral legacy by way of contrast. To point the moral without offending Squire Tomple’s pride, and without inflicting useless pain upon the Squire’s sufficiently wounded heart, was no easy task; but the parson was not lacking in tact and tenderness, so he succeeded in making of his sermon an appeal so powerful and all-applicable that none of the hearers found themselves at liberty to search out those to whom the sermon might seem personally addressed.

Among the hearers was Mr. Crupp, and no one seemed more deeply interested and affected. He followed the funeral cortege to the cemetery; but, arrived there, he halted at the gate, instead of following the example of the multitude by crowding as closely as possible to the grave. The final services were no sooner concluded, however, than the object of Mr. Crupp’s unusual conduct became apparent to one person after another, the disclosure being made to people in the order of their earthly possessions. The parson was shocked at learning that Mr. Crupp was importuning every man of means to take stock in a woolen mill, to be established at Barton; but a whispered word or two from Crupp caused the parson to abate his displeasure, and finally to stand near Crupp’s side and express his own hearty approbation of the enterprise proposed. Then Mr. Crupp whispered a few words to Squire Tomple, and the Squire subscribed a hundred shares at ten dollars each, information of which act was disseminated among business men and well-to-do farmers by Parson Wedgewell with an alacrity which, had modern business ideas prevailed at Barton, would have laid the parson open to a suspicion of having accepted a few shares, to be paid for by his own influence. Then Deacon Jones subscribed twenty shares, and Judge Macdonald, Fred’s father, promised to take fifty; Crupp’s name already stood at the head of the list for a hundred. No stock-company had ever been organized at Barton before, and the citizens had always manifested a laudable reluctance to allow other people to handle their money; but this case seemed an exception to all others; confidence in the enterprise was so powerfully expressed, alike by the mercantile community, the bar, the church, and the unregenerate (the last-named class being represented by the ex-vender of liquors), that people who had any money made haste to participate in what seemed to them a race for wealth with the odds in everybody’s favor. Crupp neglected no one; he scorned no subscription on account of its smallness; before he left the cemetery gate nearly half the requisite capital had been pledged, and before he slept that night he found it necessary to accept rather more than the twenty thousand dollars which, it had been decided two days before, would be needed. Several days later a board of directors was elected; two or three of the directors informally offered the superintendency of the mill to Fred Macdonald, on condition that he would pledge himself to abstain from the use of intoxicating beverage while he held the position, and then Fred was elected superintendent in regular form and by unanimous vote of the board of directors.

Great was the excitement in Barton and the tributary country when it was announced that the mill needed no more money, and that, consequently, no more stock would be issued. In that mysterious way in which such things always happen, the secret escaped, and encountered every one, that his new position would prevent Fred Macdonald from drinking; non-stockholders had then the additional grievance that they had been deprived of taking any part in an enterprise for the good of a fellow-man, and all because the rich men of the village saw money in it. None of these injured ones dared to express their minds on this subject to Squire Tomple, to whom so many of them owed money, or to Judge Macdonald, who, in his family pride, would have laid himself liable to action by the grand jury, had any one suggested that his oldest son had ever been in any danger of becoming a drunkard. But to Mr. Crupp they did not hesitate to speak freely; Crupp owned no mortgages, no total abstainers owed him money; besides, he not only was not a church member, but he had been in that most infernal of all callings, rum-selling. So it came to pass that when one day Crupp went into Deacon Jones’s store for a dollar’s worth of sugar, and was awaiting his turn among a large crowd of customers, Father Baguss constituted himself spokesman for the aggrieved faction, and said,

“It ’pears to me, Mr. Crupp, as if reformin’ was a payin’ business.”

Crupp being human, was not saintly, so he flushed angrily, and replied,

“It ought to be, if the religion you’re so fond of is worth a row of pins; but I don’t know what you’re driving at.”

“Oh! of course you don’t know,” said Father Baguss; “but everybody else does. You don’t expect to make any money out of that woolen mill, do you?”

“Yes I do, too,” answered Crupp quickly. “I’ll make every cent I can out of it.”

“Just so,” said Father Baguss, consoling himself with a bite of tobacco; “an’ them that’s borne the burden and heat of the day can plod along and not make a cent ’xcept by the hardest knocks. I’ve been one of the Sons of Temperance ever since I was converted, an’ that’s nigh onto forty year; I don’t see why I don’t get my sheer of the good things of this world.”

“If you mean,” said Crupp, with incomparable deliberation, “that my taking stock in the mill is a reward to me for dropping the liquor business, you’re mightily mistaken. I’d have taken it all the same if anybody had put me up to it when I was in the liquor business.”

“Yes,” sighed Father Baguss, “like enough you would; as the Bible says, ‘The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light.’ I can’t help a-gettin’ mad, though, to think it has to be so.”

Two or three unsuccessful farmers lounging about the stove sighed sympathetically, but Crupp indulged in a sarcastic smile, and remarked,

“I always supposed it was because the children of light had got their treasure laid up in heaven, and were above such worldly notions.”

The late sympathizers of Father Baguss saw the joke, and laughed with unkind energy, upon which the good old man straightened himself and exclaimed,

“The children of the kingdom have to earn their daily bread, I reckon; manna don’t fall nowadays like it used to do for the chosen people.”

“Exactly,” said Crupp, “and them that ain’t chosen people don’t pick up their dinners without working for them either, without getting into jail for it. But, say! I didn’t come in here to make fun of you, Father Baguss. If you want some of that mill stock so bad, I’ll sell you some of mine—that is, if you’ll go into temperance with all your might.”

The old man seemed struck dumb for a moment but when he found his tongue, he made that useful member make up for lost time. “Go into temperance!” he shouted. “Did anybody ever hear the like of that? I that’s been a “Son” more’n half my life; that’s spent a hundred dollars—yes, more—in yearly dues; that’s been to every temperance meetin’ that’s ever been held in town, even when I’ve had rheumatiz so bad I could hardly crawl; that kept the pledge even when I was out in the Black Hawk War, where the doctors themselves said that I ort to have drank; that’s plead with drinkers, and been scoffed an’ reviled like my blessed Master for my pains; that’s voted for the Maine Liquor Law; that’s been dead agin lettin’ Miles Dalling into the church because he brews beer for his own family drinkin’, though he’s a good enough man every other way, as fur as I can see; I that went to see every member of our church, an’ begged an’ implored ’em not to sell our old meetin’-house to the feller that’s since turned it into a groggery; I to be told by a feller like you, that’s got the guilt of uncounted drunkards on your soul——”

Crupp, with a very white face, advanced a step or two toward the old man; but the participator in the Black Hawk War was not to be frightened, especially when he was so excited as he was now; so he roared,

“Come on! come on! perhaps you want my blood on your soul, with all the others; but just let me tell you, it isn’t easy to get!”

Crupp recovered himself and replied, “Father Baguss, all that you’ve done is very well in its way, but it wasn’t going into temperance. You’ve been a first-rate talker, I know, but talk isn’t cider. Why, there’s been lots of men in my store after listenin’ to one of your strong temperance speeches, and laughed about what they’ve heard. I’ve told them they ought to be ashamed of themselves—don’t shake your head—I have, and all they’d say would be, ‘Talk don’t cost anything, Crupp.’ But if you’d followed up your tongue with your brains, and most of all your pocket, not one of them chaps would have opened his head about you.”

“Money!” exclaimed the old man; “didn’t I tell you that division dues alone had cost me more’n a hundred dollars; not to speak of subscriptions to public meetin’s?”

“And every cent that didn’t go to pay ‘division’ expenses, that is—for keeping a lodge-room in shape for you to meet in, and such things—went to pay for more talk. Did you Sons of Temperance ever buy a man away from his whisky? It might have been done—done cheap too—in almost any week since I’ve been in Barton, by helping down-hearted men along. Did you ever do it yourself?”

Father Baguss was nonplussed for a moment, noting which a bystander, also a Son of Temperance, came valiantly to the rescue of his order, by exclaiming,

“Tongues was made to use, and the better the cause, the more it needs to be talked about.”

“There’s no getting away from that,” said Crupp. “Talk’s all right in its place; but when anybody’s sick in your family, you don’t hire somebody to come in and talk him well, do you?”

The auxiliary replied by pressing perceptibly closer to the bale of blankets against which he had been leaning, and Crupp was enabled to concentrate his attention upon Father Baguss. But the old soldier had in his military days unconsciously acquired a tactical idea or two which were frequently applicable in real life. One of them was that of flanking, and he straightway attempted it by exclaiming,

“I’d use money quick enough on drunkards, if I saw anybody fit to use it on,” said he; “it would do my old soul good to find a drinking man that I could be sure money would save. But they’re a shiftless, worthless pack of shotes, all that I see of ’em. There wuz a young fellow—Lije Mason his name was—that I once thought seriously of doin’ somethin’ fur; but he went an’ signed the pledge, an’ got along all right by himself.”

“But there’s your own neighbors, old Tappelmine and his family—they all drink; what have you done for ’em?” asked Crupp.

“A lot of Kentucky poor white trash!” exclaimed Father Baguss. “What could anybody do for ’em? Besides, they do for ’emselves; they’ve stole hams out of my smoke-house more’n once, an’ they know I know it, too.”

“Poor white trash is sometimes converted in church, isn’t it?” asked Mr. Crupp; “and what’s to keep poor white trash from stopping drinking? what but a good, honest, religious, rum-hating neighbor that looks at ’em so savagely and lets ’em alone so hard that they’d take pains to get drunk, just to worry him? I know how you feel toward them; I saw it once: one Sunday I passed you on the road just opposite their place; you was in your wagon takin’ your folks to church, and I—well, I was out trying to shoot a wild turkey, which I mightn’t have been on a Sunday. They were all laughin’ and cuttin’ up in the house—it’s seldom enough such folks get anything to laugh about—and I could just see you groan, and your face was as black as a thunder cloud, and as savage as an oak knot soaked in vinegar. The old man came out just then for an armful of wood, and nodded at you pleasant enough; but that face of yours was too much for him, and pretty soon he looked as if he’d have liked to throw a chunk of wood at your head. I’d have done it, if I’d been him. The old man was awfully drunk when I came back that way, two or three hours later. That was a pretty day’s work for a Son of Temperance, wasn’t it—and Sunday, too?”

The casing to Father Baguss’s conscience was not as thick as that to his brain, and he was silent; perhaps the prospect of getting some mill stock aided the good work in his heart.

Crupp continued: “I’m a ‘Son’ myself, now, and I know what a man agrees to when he joins a division. If you think you’ve lived up to it—you and the other members of the Barton Division—I suppose you’ve a right to your opinion; but if my ideas, picked up on both sides of the fence, are worth anything to you, they amount to just this: the Sons of Temperance in this town haven’t done anything but help each other not to get back into bad ways again, and to give a welcomin’ hand to anybody that’s strong enough in himself to come into the division with you; and that isn’t the spirit of the order.”

Crupp got his sugar, and no one pressed him to stay longer; but, as he slowly departed, as became a soldier who was not retreating but only changing his base, Father Baguss followed him, touched his sleeve as soon as he found himself outside the store door, and said,