The Boy Who Was Not "Sensitive."
By Annette L. Noble
Two boys, almost young men, were standing before a closed shop-door in earnest debate. It was a half-holiday, and Ned Grey was teasing Morris Parker to go with him on a barge up the river to a firemen's picnic. "No, Ned; there are, as you say, some grand fellows going, but you know we can't keep away from Tom Allen's set; he won't let us; and they all drink." "You need not care for that; you boast that you aren't afraid ever to say 'No!'" "I don't mean to boast about it; but it is true I can say 'No' to an invitation to drink any hour of the day or the night." "Well, you aren't sensitive, and I am. I can't bear to set myself up for sombody with extra-fine notions and so seem to cast reflections on other people; and it hurts me to be made fun of and sneered at. You never do seem to feel that; some folks never are sensitive. It is good; I wish I had been made that way," said Ned. Morris colored; he considered himself, and with reason, a boy of quite as much fine feeling as was Ned, who many times had spoken in this way. "Perhaps you would not think some things worth feeling now if you had felt more in the past—if you had felt half what I have." "Tell me your life, Methuselah," said Ned, with a careless laugh. "Sit down a minute, then, on that box and I will," said Morris; and Ned sat down. "I was born in G——, fifty miles from here. My father was an educated gentleman in the fullest sense of both words. He was a lawyer. But he drank. For years he managed to conceal it from everybody but mother. She did everything for him a woman could do, but if she had not had a small property secured to her in a way he could not appropriate, she would have come to want. By the time I was nine years old I realized that father earned little or nothing and that mother spent hours crying alone in her room. I had the loveliest little sister Bess you ever could imagine. I never saw any fancy picture half so pretty. She had long, floating yellow hair and the strangest blue eyes, with long, jet-black lashes. Father was very proud of her, and always kind to us both; but then we had really never seen him drunk. When he came home intoxicated mother must always have got us out of the way. Well, one day she had gone away from home and father returned at a very unusual hour. He was going on business to L——, a large city near our town. Bess and I teased to go, and he took us along just as we were—Bess with her little straw hat stuck full of flowers, I remember, and her pretty hands all strawberry stains. We got to L—— early in the day and father attended to his business. We followed him up and down long stairs until we were tired and hungry, for it was a hot June day. About noon Bess said she wanted ‘something cool to eat—some nice frozen pudding;’ she meant ice-cream. Father discovered then that he had only a little money in his pocket. He had come off in haste, and our tickets had taken his extra change; but he had enough for a cheap lunch for us all, he said. He looked about and saw a saloon and took us in. It was cool and neat—just like all such places; they make me deathly sick when I glance in even now. They were just out of ice-cream, the waiter said, but had sent for some. Wouldn't we wait a minute? Then he asked father to have a drink of something. From the little I knew I was alarmed, and little Bess, too, was quick enough to begin begging him away. ‘Papa, papa, do let us go on; by the other corner I saw such nice cake, and I am very hungry; we don't want the cream so much as cake and meat, papa.’ "It wasn't any use; he had found a man he knew standing at the bar, and they drank together, and father forgot he hadn't much money and paid for all they drank. They talked and laughed, and at last tried a new drink the barkeeper joked them about. Bess began to cry, and father remembered, perhaps, that he had nothing to pay for anything more and in shame hurried us off. He said he was ‘so sorry,’ and if ‘poor little sister was very hungry’ he would pawn something. She said: ‘No, no, papa; let us go right home!’" "She looked all white around her lips, and it was very hot; but both we were afraid to be left with father, and longed to get him home. He had begun to talk and roar and laugh before he left the saloon. Soon he staggered and mumbled and pulled us here and there, or half tumbled over us. People began to stare and whisper; boys jeered and yelled, ‘Hi! hi! Old Tipsy!’ I tell you for two high-spirited children it was pretty hard. We felt it. Bess was like a little woman; she said: ‘We must get him right to the station, and he may wait there until the train comes. In the depot we can sit each side of him and hold him up straight.’ She looked like a little broken white lily in the blazing sun as she said it. A policeman insisted upon arresting him, but when we pleaded with him he was very kind and went to the corner near the depot with us. We got there at last, and father went to sleep. Bess kept getting dizzy, and said the benches and the stove were swimming in the air. There was a refreshment-table in the room with great sugar-sprinkled buns and cool milk for sale. It seemed as if we must have some, but when Bess put her little stained hands in father's pockets she could not find one penny; the barkeeper had the last. I make more of this because I can't bear to tell the—Well, one, two, three trains came in at once. We waked father up to go and see which was ours for G——. He could not think at first and staggered about; then he got into a great hurry, and tried to be very smart and appear to know just where we were to go. He was half ashamed and half crazy. Little Bess thought he knew where to go when we got out to the tracks. A man pushed me one way. Father must have started and sent her ahead another. An engine started, a train backed; I heard people groan and others cry, ‘Where?’ ‘Who?’ I rushed with the rest, and saw—O Ned! You think I haven't any sensitiveness! Was it just the cruel great iron wheels that had crushed my beautiful little sister's body into a mass of blood and broken bones? Wasn't it the brandy in my father's brain that sent her little feet straight under that backing train? and you wonder I can stand being sneered at when I say I hate it! I did not know what it meant until a brakeman picked up a little straw hat with a wilted pink rose in it; then I don't remember how we ever got home or who told my mother. Poor mother! who left Bessie happy as a queen in the quiet garden at home." "That was not the end of trouble, either; but it was the end of my father. He drank to forget—drank, drank, drank. It did not kill him, but it made him almost idiotic. A year after he was put in a ward in a lunatic asylum. For three years I went with my mother once a week to see him. People used to ask why she took me, and she always said, ‘That my boy may learn to hate his father's murderer. In old times some of a murdered man's family vowed to slay the murderer. I want Morris to give his life to hunting down the devil of intemperance.'" "We took that poor silly creature, sitting mumbling to himself, grinning or crying from one day's end to another, cakes, fruit, anything he asked for. Sometimes he would say ‘Give Bessie some, Bessie likes cake!’ And this is the reason, Ned, I am not afraid to say ‘No.’ But it is no reason why I should not feel some things." Ned's eyes were full of tears. He got off the box, and, grasping Morris' hand, said: "I will stick to you hereafter, and you stick to me. I don't go off to any drinking spree this day."—Annette L. Noble, in Youth's Temperance Banner.