The Beginning and the End.

White Ribbon, Volume 5, Issue 54, 1 December 1899, Page 5

The Beginning and the End.

A tramp asked for a free drink in a high-class saloon. The request was granted and when in the act of drinking the proffered beverage, one of the young men present exclaimed : “Stop! Make us a speech. It is a poor liquor that doesn’t unloosen a man’s tongue.” The tramp hastily swallowed the drink, and as the liquor coursed through his blood, he straightened himself anil stood before them with a grace and dignity that all his rags and dirt could not obscure. “ Gentlemen,” he said. “ I look tonight at you and myself, and it seems to me that I look upon the picture of my lost manhood. This bloated face was once as young and handsome as yours. This shambling figure once walked as proudly as yours, a man in the world of men. I, too, once had a home and friends and position. I had a wife as beautiful as an artist’s dream, and I dropped the priceless pearl of her honour and respect in the wine-cup, Cleopatra-like, saw it dissolve and quaffed it down in the brimming draught. I had children as sweet and as lovely as the flowers of Spring, and saw them fade and die under the blighting curses of a drunken father. I had a home where love lit the flame upon the altar and ministered before it, and I put out the holy fire, and darkness and desolation reigned in its stead. I had aspirations and ambitions that soared as high as the morning star, and broke and bruised their beautiful Wings, and at last strangled them, that I might be tortured with tluir cries no more. To-day I am a husband without a wife, a father without a child, a tramp with no home to call his own, a man in whom every good impulse is dead. And all swallowed up in the maelstrom of drink.” The tramp ceased speaking. The glass fell from his nerveless fingers and shivered into a thousand fragments on the floor. The swinging doors pushed open and shut again, and when the uttle group about the bar looked up the tramp was gone.— The Alliance Record.