What a world of trouble those who never marry escape! There are many happy matches, it is true, and sometimes “my dear,” and “my love” come from the heart; but what sensible bachelor, rejoicing in his freedom and years of discretion, will run the tremendous risk?

Preachers of temperance do not look for warning examples among moderate drinkers; but they point to the bloated, reeling drunkard; he who sleeps in the gutter at night, and cannot tell to-day Ⓐemendation, where his crust of bread is to come from to-morrow; who is a reproach to his relations; a terror to his family; a fugitive from the post given him by God in this life, a hastener to his grave, flying to the “ills we know not of;” relentlessly, mercilessly pursued, in sight of his last resting place, by serpents, and by horrid monsters in every shape, created and living in his own fiery imagination—imaginary, fancied and unreal to all else—to him a terrible reality. Temperance men point to examples such as these, and say beware! beware!! beware!!! lest you come to that. So we pass by the lesser squabbles of married life, and hold up to view an example of an extreme case of matrimony.

A squalid family living on the side of ‘Holliday's Hill’ is under the ‘protection’ of a big fellow who once in a while, say about every afternoon, gets drunk and “cuts up” considerably. Sometimes he gathers the baby and goes staggering and stumbling and pitching about over the hill, to the great dismay of his wife. Having amused himself in this manner till tired, he lays down the child, and “lams” its mama; and if the unwashed, tow-headed boarder, who stands by with his hands in his pockets, offers to interfere he “lams” him too. Within a [begin page 87] few days past, his amusements of this sort have been charmingly varied:—such as taking sheets and dresses from the clothes line, and tearing them into ribbons; smashing up the cooking stove; throwing a brick at his wife's head, and chasing her around the house with a ten foot pole. Quite a contrast, doubtless the poor woman thinks, when her mind wanders back to the courtship and the “honey-moon!” Well, we are all subject to change—except printers; they never have any spare change.