little knew then, and I daren't tell her; you see, I should have lost my only excuse if I had—but I never did for a moment forget my grief. At first I was racing up and down the columns of my ledger, always finding the sum on one side less and less every time I counted, and the other growing so big there wasn't room in the breadth of the page to put all the figures, then running for my life, breaking my shins, tumbling into holes, crawling into sewers to get out of the way, but the burn had always a hold of my leg, do what I would then the prison, colder and darker than the real one -more blasphemy, more cruel jokes, and less gin than the real one-then the court, every night over again, and every night the judge scowled at me, and the people hissed me worse and worse as if I'd done a fresh bankruptcy every day. But there's my train, and they're shutting the doors-thank you, sir, good day—and when misfortune does come, don't double it, and give it a life settlement in your property, and your heart too, by drinking to drive it away."

There are some people who have, or pretend to have, a secret pleasure in nursing their griefs. We fancy such griefs are very puny things to begin with, and will stand a good deal of humouring. But griefs, be they small or great, are of themselves like most sorts of pleasure in one respect, they don't last long; they are evanescent. Now, if people like grief, and there is any way of making it permanent, it is a pity they should not know it. Shall we tell them how they can give a living zest to their sorrow-make it incessant and immortal-convert it from a child's play and sham, into a real fire-and-blood tragedy? Drink-drink under the pretence, or under the genuine expectation, that thereby you will get rid of your little trouble, and we will warrant you that in a short time you will not know your old trouble; it will grow to a gigantic monster; it will hang about you like a shadow-greater and blacker as the day of life goes down. Or, take for further illustration, the case of an unhappy conscience. Let the sore wound in the remembrance be the result of undiscovered crime or shameful vice. In either case there is a fear of discovery and of consequences, in addition to the annoying and degrading presence of the unalterable fact.

Will not drink prove a cordial? What! for a wounded conscience? Will it help to conceal the fault from others? Will it drive out the demon from the heart? Try it. Ply the tempting draught-the nectar spiced with the blest aroma of healing and peace. By all means try it. But be sure of what you are about to do. There are other ways of getting rid of these nightmares of the broad staring day, but they are unpleasant as they are effectual. Confess your crime, surrender to justice, and you will then, at least, be free from apprehension, and remorse will have its keen tooth-edge blunted by your submission to such punishment as the law appoints for your misdeed. Or is it vice that has left its sting behind; disloyalty to vows, and a lie lived evermore beneath the paining glance of genial and trusting love? Vice worse a thousand times than crime; worse in its effects upon society; all the worse because society has no protection and no revenge; all the worse to bear about in the memory, because no punishment of man's contrivance is deemed heavy enough to meet the case, and the guilty one is left perforce to God.

The relief proposed is certainly more congenial to this kind of sorrow than to any other; it is precisely the kind of relief which sin would lead a man to seek, because so has God made the universal system, that sin leads surely, more or less directly, to its own punishment. It is quite a matter of course that a spirit chafed and wasted by the indwelling of secret sin should be led by that burning pain to the most violent of all plausible means of assuagement, and the Nemesis of sin is nowhere on earth seen in so terrible a form as when it leads its victim to the intoxicating cup. To begin with. All men who strive to put a charitable interpretation on your wild folly suspect you forthwith; so that, as far as disgrace is a consequence of your secret sin, it is a secret no longer; the punishment you dreaded from afar is upon you.

Every dram you sip is as bad as the admission of a new confidante to your painful secret-lessens the chances in your favour-renders it continually more and more hopeless for you to preserve your seeming innocence. Then, again, in your own thoughts, when will there be an end to the frightful

The

accusation? In sickness-in racking pain-in the reeling quailing weakness of body and mind-where will you find a pause in the ceaseless cry-" See what that sin hath brought about!" It is fit that you should thus suffer; neither you nor others can impugn the awful justice of that law by which sin, leading ever to fresh sin, becomes its own tormentor. Is there no mercy then, you ask, for that irrevocable sin? Perhaps there is. That is beside our present question. You have sinned. The sin is a fierce venomous worm, turning upon and gnawing the heart that sheltered its young brood. wise and sober man looks out upon you in your ghastly merriment, or in your hell-boding stupor, as Lazarus may look from heaven to the pit where Dives dies again for ever. "Whatever others may have done," say they, "there can be no doubt here; this man has sinned, and he is now in hell. Shun him, for he bears the mark of the sin-curse on his brow, and he raves in the fell frenzy which his sin has brought down upon his brain." There may be pity mingling with the inevitable contempt; there may arise a compassionate prayer in the gazer's heart; but there is nothing in the revolting spectacle itself to beget such pity. It can only be begotten by a humble remembrance that, in their own experience, even for sin as great, though, perhaps, not so greatly punished, there was mercy, and forgiveness, and a true balm of healing somewhere. Oh, guilty one! will you dare the lethargy and transient death which drink would seem to give? Then know, beforehand, that in that helpless utter sleep, when those who watch believe that you are really gone to the punishment you have deserved, they are not wrong in their fear.

You have heard and read of hell, and its dark outline in the dim regions of eternity has filled you with irrepressible dread-vague meaningless dread. You could not form a notion of what punishment can become; you never could have believed that the scorching figures of Scripture were feeble comparisons of the possible fact. But you believe it now. Good God! beneath that hushed and corpse-like clay, what a flood of agony hath burst forth from undreamed-of deeps in hell! Did ever hideous sick fancy people a moment with such cruel, unrelenting, irresistible, malignant demons, as those which

now crowd the hours of night-long sleep. Could anything on earth,—could a violent and shameful death in the sight of cursing and exulting multitudes, could hell itself be worse than this? The cry will burst from your lips-"God, that I might never sleep again!" And whether he hears that cry or not, it will be answered. Drink on, thou possessed of many devils! Drink on, till, in the very laughing sunlight of high summer time, in the gay scenes of wealth's rejoicing festival, the images of that fell sleep shall start out upon you-hound you on to more than madness-show you the stain upon your hand in the broad day, which you never looked at, save in the lamplight-mock your agony, as you cry, “Out, damned spot!” come near and gaze with fiery eyeballs into your very soul; press round you as if to strike or suffocate you; then tear your secret from your yet beating, smoking heart. Then will you cry, with louder voice-“God! that I might sleep—sleep for an hour-sleep to wake no more, or to awake in hell, and know that all was past, and all resistance vain! Then might all hope die-all thoughts of mercy cease, and the keenest torture of hell be stilled, by drawing close the cloud through which I saw the Lazarus in glory, and shutting me up from that cruel mockery."

Does drink drown grief? No. It is the death-pregnant swamp in which the slight sore is inflamed; the small ailment suddenly ripened into rank fever-the plaintive sigh swollen to the angry howlings of delirium. Away with the falsehood. None believe it. All who have dared the remedy will tell you, even while they continue to use it, that not one moment's peace has it ever given them, no matter how much or little they have tried it; no matter what their sorrow.

Some few men, yielding to the pressure of their shame, leap the gulf, and we call them suicides, and even you would call them fools to add of their fair sweet earthly life so many years to the greedy hell. But you? You bring that hell here -all the more horrible to you from its dismal contrast to the hopes which hang like fruits of healing on every branch of the Tree of Life. You bring into the fair garden of God's mercy, from which in old time, he that hath the keys, thrust forth Satan yelling, the demons of perdition to enact their

obscene revels before our very eyes, in the open and refreshing day of grace. Arise, and curse them in the name they fear, back to the hell, where, if you will, you may meet them again. But do not give your strength and gladness of a few bright safe years to the greedy fires which leap forth at your invitation to lick and blast your soul.

Of Charles, then, it may be said that the disappointment and disgust which he had just experienced were, in some sense, the external causes of his lapse into the worse forms of that vice which is less able to disguise its true character than any other; for, as it both lowers a man in his own esteem, and stimulates him to seek for some one's esteem in lieu of his own, it sets him at once in his right position. It's as true as the barometer. Few ever trouble themselves to look in at the back-door to see whereabouts the mercury is. They know well enough by the index at a glance. So is it with drinking; it shows whereabouts in the scale a man is. Mark the manner, the quantities, the company, the times and seasons in which he drinks, and though you cannot tell how long he has been a drunkard, you can tell precisely how low the entire man is degraded.

CHAPTER IX.

UNPLEASANT ANXIETY.

NATHANIEL sat in his den-alone and deeply pondering. He made no sign. No sign, we should say, by which the wistful eye at the keyhole could discover the object, the nature or the extent of that emotion which had half an hour before swept like a tornado through the region of the outer office. There was a conscience far from void of offence behind that wistful eye; hence its steady application to the keyhole regardless of the draught and at the risk of inflammation. But there was no satisfactory information, either one way or the other, as to whether the gazer in question was involved in that stern meditation. It might, or it might not be, that the sense of propriety which so eminently characterized the prin