Page:The dream, or, The true history of Deacon Giles's distillery, and Deacon Jones's brewery.djvu/11



time ago the writer's notice was arrested by an advertisement in one of the newspapers, which closed with words similar to the following: "." The reader may suppose, if he choose, that the following story was a dream, suggested by that phrase.

Deacon Giles was a man who loved money, and was never troubled with tenderness of conscience. His father and his grandfather before him had been distillers, and the same occupation had come to him as an heir-loom in the family. The still-house was black with age, as well as with the smoke of furnaces that never went out, and the fumes of tortured ingredients, ceaselessly converted into alcohol. It looked like one of Vulcan's Stithies, translated from the infernal regions into this world. Its stench filled the atmosphere, and it seemed as if drops of poisonous alcoholic perspiration might be made to ooze out from any one of its timbers or clapboards at a slight pressure. Its owner was a treasurer to a Bible Society; and he had a little counting-room in one corner of the distillery where he sold Bibles.

He that is greedy of gain, troubleth his own house. Any one of those Bibles might have told him this, but he chose to learn it from experience. It was said that the Worm of the Still lay coiled in the bosom of his family; and certain it is that one of its members had drowned himself in a vat of hot liquor, in the bottom of which a skeleton was some time after found, with heavy weight tied to the ankle bones. Moreover, Deacon Giles's temper was none of the sweetest naturally; and the liquor he drank, and the fires and spirituous fumes among which he lived, did nothing to soften it. If his workmen sometimes fell into his vats, he himself oftener fell out with his workmen. This was not to be wondered at, considering the nature of their wages, which, according to no unfrequent stipulation, would be as much raw rum as they could drink.

Deacon Giles worked on the Sabbath. He would neither suffer the fires of the distillery to go out, or to burn while he was idle; so he kept as busy as they. One Saturday afternoon his workmen had quarrelled, and all went off in anger. He was in much perplexity for want of hands to do the work of the devil on the Lord's day. In the dusk of the evening a gang of singular-looking fellows entered the door of the distillery. Their dress was wild and uncouth, their eyes glared, and their language had a tone that was awful. They offered to work for the Deacon; and he, on his part, was overjoyed, for he thought within himself that, as they had probably been turned out of employment elsewhere, he could engage them on his own terms. He made them his accustomed offer, as much ruin every day, when the work was done, as they could drink; but they would not, take it. Some of them broke out and told him that they had enough of hot things where they came from, without drinking damnation in the distillery. And when they said that, it seemed to the Deacon as if their breath- burned blue; but he was not certain, and could not tell what to make of it. Then he offered them a pittance of money; but they set up such a laugh, that he thought the roof of the building would fall in. They demanded a sum which the deacon said he could not give, and would not, to the best set of workmen that ever lived, much less to such piratical-looking scape jails as they. Finally, he said, he would give half what they asked, if they would take two-thirds of that in Bibles. When he mentioned the word Bibles, they