From Wealth to Poverty Part 28

Mrs. Gurney insisted upon furnis.h.i.+ng the trouseau, and there was a small but select company at the wedding.

As Allie stood by her husband a fair young bride, her mother, in memory, went back to a wedding that took place over twenty-five years before in the dear home land, and she prayed that the daughter might not have to "pa.s.s under the rod" as she had done.

Eddie is still unmarried, and lives with his mother. And Ruth is now happy, though that happiness is mellowed by the sorrows through which she has pa.s.sed, and the memories of the loved ones she has lost; but the hope of meeting them again is the rainbow that spans the sky of her existence, s.h.i.+ning out radiantly in her hours of mist and gloom, enabling her to say, even when most cast down: "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord."

Friends, we will now say farewell. The sad tale which you have read but faintly conveys an idea of the misery, degradation, and sin which is caused in thousands of homes by this blighting; withering traffic.

Oh, rum! cursed rum! I hate it with intensest hatred: for it dims the brightest intellects; it sullies and makes impure the most spotless and the best; it spares neither frail and unprotected womanhood, innocent childhood, nor h.o.a.ry age; it enters like a serpent the Eden called home and seduces its inmates to their fall, thus turning this paradise of love into a h.e.l.l of fiercest pa.s.sions and intensest hate; it entails upon the drunkard's children in their very existence a patrimony of depraved appet.i.tes and unholy pa.s.sions; and it supplies the prisons and lunatic asylums with a large percentage of their inmates, the gallows with its victims, and h.e.l.l with lost souls. If what he has written will be effective in winning any from the ranks of the indifferent, or from the ranks of those who oppose prohibitory laws, to become active, energetic workers in the cause of temperance, and what he is convinced is the cause of G.o.d, it will amply repay

THE AUTHOR.