The man, fallen as he was, and lost to all the higher and nobler sentiments of the heart, had experienced during the day a pressure upon his feelings heavier than usual, that had its origin in some reviving memories of earlier times.

The sound of his mother’s voice had been in his ears frequently through the day; and images of persons, places, and scenes, the remembrance of which brought no joy to his heart, had many times come up before him.  At the supper-table, amid his coarse, vulgar-minded companions, his laugh was not heard as usual; and, when spoken to, he answered briefly and in monosyllables.

The tippling-house to which the man went to spend his day’s earnings and debase himself with drink, was one of the lowest haunts of vice in the city.  Gambling with cards, dominoes, and dice, occupied the time of the greater number who made it a place of resort, and little was heard there except language the most obscene and profane.  For his daily task at the wheel, the man was paid seventy-five cents a day.  His boarding and lodging cost him thirty-one and a quarter cents,—­and this had to be paid every night under penalty of being expelled from the house.  He was a degraded drunkard, and not therefore worthy of confidence nor credit beyond a single day, and he received none.  What remained of the pittance earned, was invariably spent in drink, or gambled away before he retired from the grogshop for the night; when, staggering home, he groped his way to his room, too helpless to remove his clothes, and threw himself upon a straw pallet, that could scarcely be dignified with the name of bed.  This in outline, was the daily history of the man’s life; and daily the shadows of vice fell more and more darkly upon his path.

The drinking-house had two rooms on the first floor.  In front was a narrow counter, six or eight feet in length, and behind this stood a short, bloated, vice-disfigured image of humanity, ready to supply the wants of customers.  Two or three roughly-made pine tables, and some chairs, stood around the room.  The back apartment contained simply chairs and tables, and was generally occupied by parties engaged in games of chance, for small sums.  Tobacco-smoke, the fumes of liquor, and the polluted breaths of the inmates, made the atmosphere of these rooms so offensive, that none but those who had become accustomed to inhale it, could have endured to remain there for a minute.

The man, on entering this den of vice, went to the counter and called for whisky.  A decanter was set before him, and from this he poured into a glass nearly a gill of the vilest kind of stuff and drank it off, undiluted.  About half the quantity of water was sent down after the burning fluid, to partially subdue its ardent qualities; and then the man turned slowly from the bar.  As he did so, an individual who had seen him enter, and who had kept his eyes upon him from the moment he passed through the door, came towards him with a smile of pleasure upon his countenance, and reaching out his hand, said, in an animated voice—­