The Lights and Shadows of Real Life

"Me, Mr. Mildman! me!" exclaimed the tavern-keeper, in surprise and displeasure. "You surely cannot be in earnest."

"I utter but a solemn truth, Mr. Muddler: such is your position in society! You receive food, and clothing, and comforts and luxuries of various kinds for yourself and family from the social body, and what do you give back for all these? A poison to steal away the health and happiness of that social body. You are far worse than a perfectly dead member—you exist upon the great body as a moral gangrene. Reflect calmly upon this subject. Go home, and in the silence of your own chamber, enter into unimpassioned and solemn communion with your heart. Be honest with yourself. Exclude the bias of selfish feelings and selfish interests, and honestly define to yourself your true position.'

"But, Mr. Mildman—"

The two men had paused nearly in front of Mr. Muddler's splendid establishment, and were standing there when the tavern-keeper commenced a reply to the minister's last remarks. He had uttered but the first word or two, when he was interrupted by a pale, thinly-dressed female, who held a little girl by the hand. She came up before him and looked him steadily in the face for a moment or two.

"Mr. Muddler, I believe," she said.

"Yes, madam, that is my name," was his reply.

"I have come, Mr. Muddler," the woman then said, with an effort to smile and affect a polite air, "to thank you for a present I received last night."

"Thank me, madam! There certainly must be some mistake. I never made you a present. Indeed, I have not the pleasure of your acquaintance."

"You said your name was Muddler, I believe?"

"Yes, madam, as I told you before, that is my name."

"Then you are the man. You made my little girl, here a present also, and we have both come with our thanks."

"You deal in riddles, madam, Speak out plainly."

"As I said before," the woman replied, with bitter irony in her tones, "I have come with my little girl to thank you for the present we received last night;—a present of wretchedness and abuse."

"I am still as far from understanding you as ever," the tavern-keeper said—I never abused you, madam. I do not even know you."

"But you know my husband, sir! You have enticed him to your bar, and for his money have given him a poison that has changed him from one of the best and kindest of men, into a demon. To you, then, I owe all the wretchedness I have suffered, and the brutal treatment I shared with my helpless children last night. It is for this that I have come to thank you."

"Surely, madam, you must be beside yourself. I have nothing to do with your husband."

"Nothing to do with him!" the woman exclaimed, in an excited tone. "Would to heaven that it were so! Before you opened your accursed gin palace, he was a sober man, and the best and kindest of husbands—but, enticed by you, your advertisement and display of fancy drinks, he was tempted within the charmed circle of your bar-room. From that moment began his downfall; and now he is lost to self-control—lost to feeling—lost to humanity!"

As the woman said this, she burst into tears, and then turned and walked slowly away.

"To that painful illustration of the truth of what I have said," the minister remarked, as the two stood once more alone, "I have nothing to add. May the lesson sink deep into your heart. Between you and that woman's husband existed a regular business transaction. Did it result in a mutual benefit? Answer that question to your own conscience."

How the tavern-keeper answered it, we know not. But if he received no benefit from the double lesson, we trust that others may; and in the hope that the practical truth we have endeavoured briefly to illustrate, will fall somewhere upon good ground, we cast it forth for the benefit of our fellow-men.

THE TOUCHING REPROOF

"HERE, Jane," said a father to his little girl not over eleven years of age, "go over to the shop and buy me a pint of brandy."

At the same time he handed her a quarter of a dollar. The child took the money and the bottle, and as she did so, looked her father in the face with an earnest, sad expression. But he did not seem to observe it, although he perceived it, and felt it; for he understood its meaning. The little girl lingered, as if reluctant, from some reason, to go on her errand.

"Did you hear what I said?" the father asked, angrily, and with a frowning brow, as he observed this.

Jane glided from the room and went over to the shop, hiding, as she passed through the street, the bottle under her apron. There she obtained the liquor, and returned with it in a few minutes. As she reached the bottle to her father, she looked at him again with the same sad, earnest look, which he observed. It annoyed and angered him.

"What do you mean by looking at me in that way? Ha!" he said, in a loud, angry tone.

Jane shrunk away, and passed into the next room, where her mother lay sick. She had been sick for some time, and as they were poor, and her husband given to drink, she had sorrow and privation added to her bodily sufferings. As her little girl came in, she went up to the side of her bed, and, bending over it, leaned her head upon her hand. She did not make any remark, nor did her mother speak to her, until she observed the tears trickling through her fingers.

"What is the matter, my dear?" she then asked, tenderly.

The little girl raised her head, endeavouring to dry up her tears as she did so.

"I feel so bad, mother," she replied.

"And why do you feel bad, my child?"

"Oh, I always feel so bad when father sends me over to the shop for brandy; and I had to go just now. I wanted to ask him to buy you some nice grapes and oranges with the quarter of a dollar—they would taste so good to you—but he seemed to know what I was going to say, and looked at me so cross that I was afraid to speak. I wish he would not drink any more brandy. It makes him cross; and then how many nice things he might buy for you with the money it takes for liquor."

The poor mother had no words of comfort to offer her little girl, older in thought than in years; for no comfort did she herself feel in view of the circumstances that troubled her child. She only said—aying her hand upon the child's head—

"Try and not think about it, my dear; it only troubles you, and your trouble cannot make it any better."

But Jane could not help thinking about it, try as hard as she would. She went to a Sabbath school, in which a Temperance society had been formed, and every Sabbath she heard the subject of intemperance discussed, and its dreadful consequences detailed. But more than all this, she had the daily experience of a drunkard's child. In this experience, how much of heart-touching misery was involved!—how much of privation—how much of the anguish of a bruised spirit. Who can know the weight that lies, like a heavy burden, upon the heart of a drunkard's child! None but the child—for language is powerless to convey it.

On the next morning, the father of little Jane went away to his work, and she was left alone with her mother and her younger sister. They were very poor, and could not afford to employ any one to do the house-work, and so, young as she was, while her mother was sick, Jane had everything to do:—the cooking, and cleaning, and even the washing and ironing—a hard task, indeed, for her little hands. But she never murmured—never seemed to think that she was overburdened; How cheerfully would all have been done, if her father's smiles had only fallen like sunshine upon her heart! But that face, into which her eyes looked so often and so anxiously, was ever hid in clouds—clouds arising from the consciousness that he was abusing his family while seeking his own base gratification, and from perceiving the evidences of his evil works stamped on all things around him.

As Jane passed frequently through her mother's room during the morning, pausing almost every time to ask if she wanted anything; she saw, too plainly, that she was not as well as on the day before—that she had a high fever, indicated to her by her hot skin and constant request for cool water.

"I wish I had an orange," the poor woman said, as Jane came up to her bed-side, for the twentieth time, "it would taste so good to me."

She had been thinking about an orange all the morning; and notwithstanding her effort to drive the thought from her mind, the form of an orange would ever picture itself before her, and its grateful flavour ever seem about to thrill upon her taste. At last she uttered her wish—not so much with the hope of having it gratified, as from an involuntary impulse to speak out her desire.

There was not a single cent in the house, for the father rarely trusted his wife with money—he could not confide in her judicious expenditure of it!

"Let me go and buy you an orange, mother," Jane said; "they have oranges at the shop."

"I have no change, my dear; and if I had, I should not think it right to spend four or five cents for an orange, when we have so little. Get me a cool drink of water; that will do now."

Jane brought the poor sufferer a glass of cool water, and she drank it off eagerly. Then she lay back upon her pillow with a sigh, and her little girl went out to attend to the household duties that devolved upon her. But all the while Jane thought of the orange, and of how she should get it for her mother.

When her father came home to dinner, he looked crosser than he did in the morning. He sat down to the table and eat his dinner in moody silence, and then arose to depart, without so much as asking after his sick wife, or going into her chamber. As he moved towards the door, his hat already on his head, Jane went up to him, and looking timidly in his face, said, with a hesitating voice—

"Mother wants an orange so bad. Won't you give me some money to buy her one?"

"No, I will not! Your mother had better be thinking about something else than wasting money for oranges!" was the angry reply, as the father passed out, and shut the door hard after him.

Jane stood for a moment, frightened at the angry vehemence of her father, and then burst into tears. She said nothing to her mother of what had passed, but after the agitation of her mind had somewhat subsided, began to cast about in her thoughts for some plan by which she might obtain an orange. At last it occurred to her, that at the shop where she got liquor for her father, they bought rags and old iron.

"How much do you give a pound for rags?" she asked, in a minute or two after the idea had occurred to her, standing at the counter of the shop.

"Three cents a pound," was the reply.

"How much for old iron?"