I lost sight of my patient for some months; but I am sorry to say that on one fine summer's day, when driving through one of the public thoroughfares, I saw a poor, miserable, ragged-looking man leaning against the door of a common public house, drunk, and incapable of keeping an erect position. Even in his poverty, drunkenness, and misery, I discovered it was my teetotal patient, whom I had not so long ago persuaded to break his pledge. I could not be mistaken. I had reason to know him well, for he had been a member of a Wesleyan Church, an indefatigable Sunday-school teacher, a prayer leader,-whose earnest appeals for the salvation of others I had often listened to with pleasure and edification. I immediately went to the man, and was astonished to find the change which drink, in so short a time, had made in his appearance. With manifest surprise, and looking earnestly at the poor wretch, I said:

"S., is that you?"

"Yes, it's me. Look at me again; don't you know me?" he answered, with a staggering reel and clipping his words. "Yes, I know you," I said, "and I am grieved to see you in this drunken condition. I thought you were a teetotaler?" "I was before I took your medicine," he answered, with a peculiar grin upon his countenance.

"I am sorry to see you disgracing yourself by such conduct. I am ashamed of you."

Rousing himself, as drunken people will at times, to extraordinary effort, he scoffingly replied:

"Didn't you send me here for my medicine?"

And with a delirious kind of a chuckle he hiccoughed out words I shall never forget:

"Doctor, your medicine cured my body, but it damned my soul!"

Two or three of his boozing companions, hearing our conversation, took him under their protection, and I left. As I drove away my heart was full of bitter reflections, that I had been the cause of ruining this man's prospects, not only for this world, but for that which is to come. You may rest assured I did not sleep much that night. The drunken aspect of that man haunted me, and I found myself weeping over the injury I had done him. I rose up early the next

morning and returned to his cottage, with his little garden in front, on the outskirts of the town, where I had often seen him with his wife and happy children playing about, but found to my sorrow, that he had moved some time before. At last, with some difficulty, I found him located in a low neighborhood, not far distant from the public house he had patronized the day before. Here, in such a home as none but a drunkard could inhabit, I found him laid upon a bed of straw, feverish and prostrate from the effects of the previous day's debauch, abusing his wife because she could not get him some more drink; she standing aloof, with tears in her eyes, broken down with care and grief, her children dirty and clothed in rags,—all friendless and steeped in poverty! What a wreck was there!

Turned out of the church of which he was once an ornament, his religion sacrificed, his usefulness marred, his hopes of eternity blasted,— -a poor, dejected slave to his passion for drink, without mercy and without hope!

I talked to him kindly, reasoned with him, saccored him until he was well, and never lost sight of him or let him have any peace until he had signed the pledge again.

It took him some time to recover his place in the church, but I have had the pleasure of seeing him restored. He is now, more than ever, a devoted worker in the church, and the cause of temperance is pleaded on all occasions. Can you wonder, then, that I never order strong drink for a patient now?

THE OLD DEACON'S LAMENT.-E. T. CORBETT.

Yes, I've been deacon of our church
Nigh on to fifty year,--

Walked in the way of dooty, too,

And kep' my conscience clear.

I've watched the children growin' up,

Seen brown locks turnin' gray,

But never saw such doins yet
As those I've seen to-day.

This church was built by godly men
To glorify the Lord,

In seventeen hundred and eighty-eight:
Folks couldn't then afford

Carpets and cushings and sech like-
The seats were just plain wood,
Too narrer for the sleepy ones;
In prayer we allus stood.

And when the hymns were given out,
I tell you it was grand

To hear our leader start the tunes,

With tunin'-fork in hand!

27 66

Then good old "China,' Mear," and all,
Were heard on Sabbath days,

And men and women, boys and girls,
J'ined in the song of praise.

But that old pulpit was my pride-
Just eight feet from the ground
They'd reared it up-on either side
A narrer stairs went down;
The front and ends were fitly carved
With Scripter stories all-
Findin' of Moses, Jacob's dream,
And sinful Adam's fall.

Jest room inside to put a cheer,
The Bible on the ledge

(I'll own I did get narvous when
He shoved it to the edge).

There, week by week, the parson stood,
The Scripter to expound;

There, man and boy, I've sot below,
And not a fault was found.

Of course I've seen great changes made,
And fought agenst 'em, too;

But first a choir was interdooced,
Then cushings in each pew;

Next, boughten carpet for the floor;

And then, that very year,

We got our big melodeon,

And the big shandyleer.

Well, well! I tried to keep things straight-
I went to every meetin',

And voted "No to all they said,
But found my influ'nce fleetin'.
At last the worst misfortune fell-
I must blame Deacon Brown:

He helped the young folks when they said
The pulpit should come down.

They laughed at all those pious scenes
I'd found so edifyin':

Said, "When the parson rose to preach,
He looked a'most like flyin';"
Said that "Elijah's chariot

Jest half way up had tarried;"
And Deacon Brown sot by and laughed,
And so the pi'nt was carried.

This was last week. The carpenters
Have nearly made an end-
Excoose my feelin's. Seems to me
As ef I'd lost a friend.

"It made their necks ache, lookin' up,"
Was what the folks did say:

More lookin'

up

would help us all

In this degin'rate day."

The church won't never seem the same
(I'm half afeard) to me,

Under the preachin' of the truth
I've been so used to be.

And now-to see our parson stand
Like any common man,

With jest a railin' round his desk

I don't believe I can!

-Harper's Magazine.

TOO LATE.-Fitzhugh Ludlow.

There at an old man on a rock,

And unceasing bewailed him of fate,
That concern where we all must take stock,
Though our vote has no bearing or weight;
And the old man sang him an old, old song-
Never sang voice so clear and strong
That it could drown the old man's song--

For he sang the song," Too late! too late!"

"When we want, we have for our pains The promise that if we but wait

Till the want has burned out our brains,

ery means shall be present to sate;

While we send for the napkin the soup gets cold,
While the bonnet is trimming the face grows old,
When we've matched our buttons the pattern is sold,
And everything comes too late-too late!

"When strawberries seemed like red heavens,
Terrapin stew a wild dream--

When my brain was at sixes and sevens,
If my mother had 'folks' and ice cream;
Then I gazed with a lickerish hunger,
At the restaurant-man and fruit-monger-
But oh! how I wished I were younger,

When the goodies all came in a stream-in a stream

"I've a splendid blood-horse, and—a liver

That it jars into torture to trot;

My rowboat's the gem of the river

Gout makes every muscle a knot.

I can buy boundless credit on Paris and Rome,
But no palate for menus-no eyes for a dome;

Those belonged to the youth who must tarry at home,
When no home but an attic he'd got—he'd got!

"How I longed, in that lonest of garrets
Where the tiles baked my brains all July,
For the ground to grow two pecks of carrots—
Two pigs of my own in a sty-

A rose-bush-a little thatched cottage-
Two spoons-love-a basin of pottage-
Now in freestone I sit-and my dotage-

With a woman's chair empty close by-close by!

"Ah! now, though I sit on a rock,

I have shared one seat with the great;
I have sat, knowing naught of the clock,
On love's high throne of state;

But the lips that kissed and the arms that caressed,
To a mouth grown stern with delay were pressed,
And circled a breast that their clasp had blessed,
Had they only not come too late-too late!"

GOD BLESS OUR SCHOOL.

About the room the Christmas greens
In rich profusion hung,

While sparkling in their gilded dress
Those graceful vines among,

Were fitting mottoes wrought with care,
Each with its wealth of good,

And this of all that decked those walls
The children's favorite stood-

"God bless our school."