ONE night, a well-known citizen of a Western city, who had been walking for some time in the downward path, came out of his house and started down town for a night of carousal with some old companions he had promised to meet. His young wife had besought him, with imploring eyes, to spend the evening with her, and had reminded him of the time when evenings passed in her company were all too short. His little daughter had clung about his knees, and had coaxed in her pretty, willful way, for "papa" to tell her some bed-time stories; but habit was stronger than love for child and wife, and he eluded her tender questioning by the deceits and excuses which are the convenient refuge of the intemperate, and so went on his way.
When he was some blocks distant from his home, he found that, in changing his coat, he had forgotten to remove his wallet; and he could not go out on a drinking bout without money, even though he knew his family needed it and his wife was economizing every day more and more, in order to make up his deficits. So he hurried back, and crept softly past the window of his little home, in order that he might steal in and obtain it without running the gauntlet of either questions or caresses.
But, as he looked through the window, something stayed his feet. There was a fire in the grate within, for the night was chill, and it lit up the little parlor and brought out in startling effect the pictures on the wall. But these were nothing to the pictures on the hearth. There, in the soft glow of the fire-light, knelt his child at her mother's feet, its small hands clasped in prayer, its fair head bowed; and as its rosy lips whispered each word with childish distinctness, the father listened, spell-bound, to the words which he himself had so often uttered at his own mother's knee—
"Now I lay me down to sleep."
His thoughts ran back to his boyhood hours; and, as he compressed his bearded lips, he could see in memory the face of that mother, long since gone to her rest, who taught his own infant lips prayers which he had long forgotten to utter.
The child went on, and completed her little verse, and then, as prompted by the mother, continued—
"God bless mamma, papa, and my own self;" then there was a pause, and she lifted her troubled blue eyes to her mother's face.
"God bless papa," prompted the mother, softly.
"God—bless papa," lisped the little one.
"And—please send him home sober." He could not hear the mother as she said this; but the child followed in a clear, inspired tone—
Mother and child sprung to their feet in alarm, when the door opened so suddenly; but they were not afraid when they saw who it was. That night, when little Mary was being tucked up in bed, after such a romp with papa, she said, in the sleepiest and most contented of voices—
"Mamma, God answers most as quick as the telephone, doesn't he?"—Sel.