WHAT RUM WILL DO FOR AN ATHLETE.
By Christian Advocate
"MIKE CUSHING" died early Wednesday morning at the Inebriates' Home, at Eighty-ninth Street and Second Avenue, South Brooklyn, aged twenty-seven years. He was an athlete and a prize fighter. As a boy, he worked at the forge as a horseshoer; but being very strong he was led into fighting, and had more than thirty public conflicts, in which he almost always prevailed. He was at first nearly a teetotaler, but took to hard drinking, and finally attempted to keep saloons at Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay. This broke him down, and "the cause of his death was pneumonia, produced by alcoholism." From Presidents of the United States through the diversified territory of honorable human activity, and lower, through the descending scale of dishonorable human activity to the prize fighter, rum has shown its power to blast the intellect, paralyze the will, sear the conscience, petrify the heart, rack with pain the body, and quench the spark of life.—Christian Advocate.