Pooh! what is Doctor Pinch to Doctor Benson?"

[Pg 72]

After a little while a cry of murder rang through his half intoxicated brain. A great chill crept over his frame. The night became horrible in its stillness.

He must try the old resource. It never failed, whisky must restore the energy. He took up the glass from the table. It fell from his hands as if he was paralyzed.

He had made a fearful mistake. The cup of whisky which he had poured out for himself was the last drink[Pg 73] which he had ministered to Job. He had taken the sleeping draught by mistake.

[Pg 73]

When they came, he thought and found him so still, so senseless, and that for days he never moved, would they not bury him! Then he might smother in the grave! Or waking some twenty years hence, he would wake in some tomb, some vile epitaph over him, written by that Pinch, and call for aid, and die, and die.

He saw himself in his coffin. The neighbors were all around him. The clergyman was ready to draw an awful moral against intemperance from his history. He was about to assure his hearers that no one could doubt what had become of such a man in another world.

His brain became more and more confused. He sank on the floor senseless. So Job slumbered in the box, and the doctor on the floor of the office.

Twenty years have elapsed. Dr. Benson wakes. It is a clear morning. How has the world changed! There, out of his window he sees the village. That row of neat dwellings is his property. He has a pleasant home to wake in. His wife is the very personification of happiness and prosperity. The clothes in which he arrays himself are a strange contrast to the miserable habiliments in which he fell down to sleep on the office floor twenty years ago. There is the[Pg 74] spire of the church—and thank God, he loves to enter there as a sincere and humble worshipper.

[Pg 74]

What a change in this lapse of years! What an awakening! How is the world altered!

If the doctor's voice reached the ear of the intemperate man, he said, "Friend, better the fang of the rattlesnake than your cup. The bands that you think to be threads, are iron bands that are clasping you not only for your grave, but forever. Awake! and see if the good Lord will 

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