Health and Temperance by Lanta W. Smith

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 17, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 23.

Health and Temperance.

By Lanta W. Smith

Mother's Whisky Bottle.

THE years rolled on, and the once thrifty farm was neglected. Everything was going to ruin, Nat and Jud included. There was no concealing, no smoothing over the fact any longer, they were drunkards. Perhaps it was well that the deacon had passed beyond earthly sin and sorrow, but the mother was left alone. She sadly saw her boys sink lower and lower in sin, and she was powerless to save them. She wondered that Providence could allow her to be afflicted! It was a mystery why her boys should be drunkards, when she had always been a temperance woman. To be sure, she had not gone to extremes; but she had never failed to express her temperance principles, and had tried to instill them into the characters of her boys. She had failed to help them, and one day she learned the reason.

The minister was in the sitting-room talking with Nathan; he had vainly tried to help him.

"Nathan," he said, desperately, "I wonder what could have brought you to this—with the best of parents and advantages. What was it?"

The mother in the kitchen paused to hear the answer.

Nathan turned almost fiercely, and said:—

"You want to know, do ye? Well I can tell you in a few words; but I wish you wouldn't be trying any more to save me. I'm past help. I must have liquor as long as I breathe. What brought me to this? Well, sir, nothing more or less than mother's whisky bottle!"

A piteous, trembling cry came through the kitchen. It was too sudden—that fearful revelation. Had she ruined the boys she loved better than life? They took her up from the bare floor where she had fallen, and laid her on the bed, tenderly, reverently. They had never blamed her, those boys, and they had never meant that she should know that her medicinal whisky had formed their terrible appetite. It was not long after that that they laid her down by the deacon's side. She was crushed under the sad truth which had come to her with its weight of sorrow and remorse, and she could not rally.

Often through the village streets stagger the Lindley boys, now drunken sots, with no home, and no one to care for them. Every one wonders what brought them to such depths; but only the minister knows that it was "mother's whisky bottle."—Lanta W. Smith.