How I Would Paint a Bar-room.
By T. Griffith
If I had the adorning of a bar-room it should be done somewhat in this wise:— On one side I would paint death on the pale horse, his arm weilding to the thunder-bolt, the fiery hoofs of his flying steed treading down everything that is fair and lovely; the garden of Eden before him, a blackened waste behind him. On the other hand I would draw the picture of a wretched hovel, once a happy home; the roof broken in, the windows stuffed with rags; in the doorway a weeping wife with ragged children clinging to her skirts, piteously beseeching her for bread. In the distance should be seen the once happy husband and father, now a reeling drunkard, on his way from the village tavern to the hut he calls home. Back of the bar, in full view of the bloated creatures that stand with the cup to their lips, I would paint a company of demons, in the death dance of fiendish hilarity around a fire kindled with the flames of alcohol, and over which I would write in lurid letters: “Moderate drinking lights the flame that burns to the lowest hell.” Opposite the bar should be a lonely and dishonored grave; a lightning-blasted tree should stretch its leafless branches over it; and on some withered bough should perch the melancholy owl hooting to the wintry moon. At the foot of the grave should kneel the angel of mercy, with eyes and hands upraised to the pitying heavens, and at the head of the grave should be the angel of justice, carving with stern, relentless hands upon the tombstone those fearful words of doom, “No drunkard shall enter the kingdom of God.” In the intervening spaces I would have, here a grinning skeleton, there a broken heart, a shattered hour-glass, a stranded boat, a torch extinguished in blackness of darkness; while from over the doorway and from the ceiling should look down all kinds of woful faces—pale, imploring, wrathful, deadly, despairing. The walls of the room should be shrouded in sackcloth, and the floor covered with ashes, and the bar wreathed in weeping willow and gloomy cypress, while all the vessels that held the damning fluid should be black as the gates of doom. Then I would call the rumseller, if he would, to take his place behind the bar; and, though a few besotted wretches, hardened in crime, might stagger up to the bar and drink defiance to their fate, yet I should hope that the young—the pride of mothers and the light of homes—might turn away as though they had caught a glimpse of the infernal world.—Rev. T. Griffith.