drinking again." Go to the wretched hovel he calls a home and ask his wife has she a husband and she will tell you she has two — saving your presence — " One (my man when sober) is real good and kind; the other (my man when drinking) is a perfect brute." And if you care to stay around until the drunken husband comes home — oh! if you have tears to shed prepare to shed them then. For then the vitriol madness mounts to the ruffian's brain, and the filthy bylane rings with the yell of his trampled wife. And so they go on#year in and year out, till even the poor wife in sheer despair takes to drink too. And so they live drunken lives and die drunken deaths, and leave a family with the hereditary taint — heirs to nothing but the besetting sin of their parents.
Lastly, drink affects the drunkard's neighbors. Oh, Bacchus the wine-god does not go unattended, but leads in his train a debauched company as mad and debauched as himself. And neither does the drunkard go down his dishonored way to a more dishonored grave single-handed and alone. When he drinks he drinks in company, and when he spends his children's money he helps to spend the money of other men's children, and the moan of his heartbroken wife finds an echo in many a miserable home. I make it a rule, the drunkard says, always to treat when I meet another man; and when I am alone and take one glass I feel like another man and so I treat myself to a second and so on. Go to the asylums and prisons, and many of the wretched inmates will tell you they are there through drunkenness whose first
