And the traffickers in human souls bought it at a price, paid him in liquid fire, and he returned to his home, more fiend than when he left it.  The wife’s dress was gone; the comfortable things she hoped to procure for the children were gone.  She sat up and toiled late at night—­and all for what?  To procure that poison for her husband that was contaminating his and her own soul, and cast such a blight upon her home.  Was it not enough that their house and land were mortgaged, their horse and carriage gone? but must she toil with her own hands, to satisfy that appetite that cries, “give, give?” As these thoughts passed through Mrs. Benson’s mind, she mentally exclaimed,

“O, it is a sad thing to be a drunkard’s wife.”

A few weeks after she went to an old chest that stood in one corner of the room, to get a piece of woolen goods she had carefully prepared for the market, which would bring her several dollars.  She had placed an old band box, quill wheel and some other rubbish upon the chest, to conceal it from view as much as possible.  Upon opening it, she discovered her treasure was gone, and she knew too well, for what purpose.  The son, too, drank with his father, and got so much the start of him in brutality, that even he cowered before him, thus realizing that “He that soweth the wind shall reap the whirlwind.”  But those years passed on; the children grew up in their perverseness, a family that feared neither God or man.

No prayer ever ascended, like sweet incense, from those hearts; no hymns of praise fell from those lips; but they daily invoked curses upon each other—­and who shall say that the curse causeless came?

The eldest daughter married a miserable drunkard, contrary to the wishes of her father, threatening to fire the house over their heads, if they opposed her in the least.  The second daughter lived in disgrace, with a man equally miserable, till the house was demolished over their heads.

The poor heart-broken wife died, and was borne away to the grave.  The son became of age, took the homestead from his father by making arrangements to redeem it, and threw his father into the poor house, where he wore out the remainder of his days in wretchedness and misery.

The son, by perseverence, won the hand of an amiable young lady, of an excellent family, and contrary to the expectations of every one, treated her with the greatest kindness the two years he lived with her, attending church with her every Sabbath, and evincing a great change in many other ways.

But the desire of riches urged him, with hundreds of our fellow citizens, to seek the land of gold, and like many of them too, fell a prey to his ambition.  He died on shipboard, never reaching the place of his destination.

Dr. Somers died about the same time, and was buried in his own quiet yard, in the little village that had been the theatre of his life.  That young form that had been educated for the express purpose of dancing on his grave, was tossing beneath the tumultuous waves of the briny ocean, never to be at rest.