Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/454

438[April 10, 1869] with my family, I received the appointment that had been promised me, and resolved to work hard, and walk warily for the remainder of my days; to put the drag upon the wheel, or stop the coach of conviviality altogether. I kept my resolution indifferently well for six or seven years, and in addition to the current routine of my newspaper duties, threw off songs, ballads, and epigrams almost as freely as the clouds throw out the rain drops, and got as little for my drops as the clouds for theirs. I published a volume of them, which did not so greatly take the taste of the public, as to pay the expense of printing, and I at one time thought I should have had to go to jail, for the debt I had contracted for this unlucky venture. I got over it, somehow; though the thing was like a millstone round my neck for a longer time than I can now remember. I think it was the unsuccess of the unlucky book—I made a bonfire one night of three or four hundred unsold copies of it, determined that they should not go to the trunk-makers—that drove me for comfort to the whisky again. I took it as a medicine for the hope deferred that maketh the heart sick, and found it successful.

Such was my experience, as it has been that of thousands of others—and as long and as often as I was in the mood for it, I never had far to look to find companions to treat me, as in an earlier time—to laugh at my sallies of wit, if wit it was, and to applaud the lightest utterances of the rollicking humour that possessed me, after the third or fourth tumbler. For ten years I have been in this plight. I have knocked at death's door and not been admitted. I have slept in barns and outhouses. I have been in the hospital, and I have been in the lunatic asylum; and I am, as you now see me, a poor wreck of a man, one whom it is impossible to save, even if he were worth the salvage. My wife left me long ago; but is still alive. I dare not go to see her. My children are all grown up and able to take care of themselves which—is more than I can do. And yet I think I was made for better things. I feel some spark of divinity within me, that whisky has not quenched, and that I might have been a good man, if I had had a strong will to govern me in my early days, and train me properly. But I never had any guidance except the gratification of my own will; and cannot say with Robert Burns that the light that led astray was light from Heaven. No, it was light from Hell. You ask me if I have any hopes or plans for the future? Frankly, I have none. My mind—or what is left of it—is as purposeless as the wandering wind. It cannot fix itself to anything; and it is a wonder to me, if what I have said in our walk, has been consistent and coherent. I think, however, if I like anything, that I should like to get out of the city and all its ways, and live wholly in the country. It is my present idea—I don't know how long it will last—that I could take the part of assistant gardener, if there were not much digging to do, for my back is weaker than my mind, and stooping pains me. But light work, pruning, training, weeding, and pottering about, as I might say, just to give me a pursuit, or the semblance of a pursuit, takes my fancy for the moment; and possibly, God knows! might make me respectable for the remainder of my days." "And your wife?" I interposed. "Well, poor woman, she thinks me incorrigible and irreclaimable. Perhaps I am, but I hope not; and could I exorcise the whisky demon out of me, it is very likely she would come back to me. Women are better than men, all the world over, suffer more, love more, and are worth more."

Mr. Donaldson would not sit down with me to dinner in the inn at which we halted. "I am too proud to sit down with you," he said; "too proud to afford the waiters an opportunity to stare at you and think you eccentric, or out of your mind, for consorting with such a ragged, rascally-looking vagabond as I am. Give me the means to get a dinner by myself, and I give you my honour I will spend it on dinner, and return to you as fresh and liquorless as I am now." I trusted him, and he kept his word; and we walked back to the great city in due time, when he received his stipulated guerdon for his loss of time; and made a solemn promise to call upon me that day week, sober. He kept his word in this instance also. Meanwhile, I had spoken about him to our friend the member for the city—interested him in Donaldson's talents, character, and prospects, and procured for him the post he coveted of assistant-gardener in the honourable gentleman's domain. He had light work—a little pleasant cottage to live in—and humble, but sufficient, wages. His wife rejoined him; and for six months, perhaps the happiest of his life, he lived amid the trees and flowers, and did not get drunk above once a fortnight. But the end was at hand. His constitution was shattered. The flame of life burned low in the socket, and he went off suddenly without a sign or a groan. Peace to his memory! He was an acorn that had the capacity for becoming an oak-tree if circumstances had favoured; but he fell into evil places, and rotted into barrenness; or, if the simile be more appropriate, he was found by a swine—the swine of Intemperance that consumed and destroyed him.

FACTS AND FANCIES.

THROWING STONES IN THE SEA.

sat on the shore at Shanklin,

Howard, and Smith, and I;

Smith was smoking, I was thinking,

Howard was idling by.

He took a stone and tossed it

Carelessly into the sea;

And then another, again another,

And sometimes two or three.

"What are you doing, Howard?"

"I'm losing my money again,—

This little pebble's a thousand

I dropped in that scheme in Spain.