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Ten Years’ Work

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Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 11, 1883

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 9, No. 2.

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Ten Years’ Work.

“O HAN! I’ve heard bad news about you,” said Mrs. Eldred, excitedly, rushing into her friend Mrs. Peeble’s cozy room.
“Why, Emily,” said Mrs. Peebles, her rosy cheeks growing more rosy still, “how you startled me! I thought the house was on fire.”
“ Worse than that, Han; I have heard that you have sold this lovely farm and bought a horrible hotel. Tell me it isn’t so; I cannot bear it.”
“We have certainly sold our farm, and bought, not a ‘horrible’ hotel but a nice one at Mt. Morris; I am tired of hard work. But why should this excite you?”
“O Hannah!” said Mrs. Eldred, sinking down in a chair and covering her face with her hands, “I am so sorry! so sorry! Suppose your husband and son become drunkards?”
“My husband is a gentleman, I do not fear him; and Johnny—if we cannot control such a slip of a boy as that, I’m sorry.”
“Bet I’ll have all the wine I want for once!” said ten-year-old Johnny looking saucily up.
“And I too,” said his little sister; “it’s so good!” And the dimpled little maiden began to practice her dancing steps. They were lovely children, and the mother, fresh and blooming as a girl, was a beauty. The neat, tasteful home bore evidences of good house-wifery, and Mrs. Peebles bore the palm in all the country around for cookery.
“Just the place to put you my bonnie wife,” said Mr. Peebles, as he regaled himself at her bountiful table. “It’s just barbarous for me to monopolize all your talents. You’ll make my fortune in a hotel, where so many can enjoy your exquisite, fine cookery.”
“Only think of it, Ezra! that ridiculous Emily is afraid you’ll get to be a drunkard if you go into a horrible hotel, and she cried about it!”
A merry laugh followed this speech, which prevented Mrs. Peebles from noticing the flush which covered her husband’s handsome forehead.
“Thank fortune! we’ve got a gentleman for hotel-keeper now,” said the Mt. Morris people, as the new landlord and his family settled down in their new home, which was freshly garnished for the sacrifice.
Down grade is the swiftest. Is that why so many take it? Not a year had passed by when friends began to whisper, “Mr. Peebles is too good a customer of himself.” Johnny grew up rough and roystering. Nettie became more beautiful than her mother, and while she was yet in her early teens, ran away with a traveling agent who frequented the house, and married him. This ill-assorted marriage was soon dissolved by voluntary separation, and Nettie, a tarnished flower, returned to her father’s house. Life in the hotel only lasted a few years,—years which sufficed to plant the appetite for the “liquid fire” firmly in father and son. Disease, too, was rioting upon the abused vital forces. Consumption means something when it is super-induced by alcohol.
Mr. Peebles, after a few months of intense suffering, went down into the grave, and Mrs. Peebles, wasted and worn, looks back upon her ten years’ work, lost treasures, dissipated fortune, and sighs, “Oh if I had only known!”
She sees the cows and sheep quietly grazing near the dear old farm-house, where the birds sing all the day long. She passes by the “horrible hotel,” still busy at its work of death, and murmurs, “What a choice I made! and I am reaping the fruit of what I have sown.”
Reader, this is no fancy sketch; only the names are fictitious. It is a true record of a part of ten years’ work.—National Temperance Advocate.