“Rest and quiet!” said John Anderson to himself, “I don’t see how I am to get it, with such a wife as I have always worrying and bothering me about something.”  “Mr. Anderson,” said one of the servants, “Mrs. Anderson says please come, as quick as possible into Mr. Frank’s room.”

“What’s the matter now!”

“I don’t know, but Mr. Frank’s acting mightily queer; he thinks there are snakes and lizards crawling over him.”

“He’s got the horrors, just what I expected.  Tell me about rest and quiet!  I’ll be there in a minute.  Oh what’s the matter?  I feel strange,” said Anderson falling back on the bed suddenly stricken with paralysis.  While in another room lay his younger son a victim to delirium tremens, and dying in fearful agony.  The curse that John Anderson had sent to other homes had come back darkened with the shadow of death to brood over his own habitation.  His son is dying, but he has no word of hope to cheer the parting spirit as it passed out into the eternity, for him the darkness of the tomb, is not gilded with the glory of the resurrection.

The best medical skill has been summoned to the aid of John Anderson, but neither art, nor skill can bind anew the broken threads of life.  The chamber in which he is confined is a marvel of decoration, light streams into his home through panes of beautifully stained glass.  Pillows of the softest down are placed beneath his head, beautiful cushions lie at his feet that will never take another step on the errands of sin, but no appliances of wealth can give peace to his guilty conscience.  He looks back upon the past and the retrospect is a worse than wasted life; and when the future looms up before him he shrinks back from the contemplation, for the sins of the past throw their shadow over the future.  He has houses, money and land, but he is a pauper in his soul, and a bankrupt in his character.  In his eager selfish grasp for gold, he has shriveled his intellect and hardened and dried up his heart, and in so doing he has cut himself off from the richest sources of human enjoyment.  He has wasted life’s best opportunities, and there never was an angel, however bright, terrible and strong, that ever had power to roll away the stone from the grave of a dead opportunity, and what John Anderson has lost in time, he can never make up in eternity.  He has formed no taste for reading, and thus has cut himself off from the glorious companionship of the good, the great, and the wise of all ages.  He has been selfish, mean and grasping, and the blessing of the poor and needy never fall as benedictions on his weary head; and in that beautiful home with disease and death clutching at his heartstrings, he has wealth that he cannot enjoy, luxuries that pall upon his taste, and magnificence that can never satisfy the restless craving of his soul.  His life has been a wretched failure.  He neglected his children to amass the ways of iniquity, and their coldness and indifference pierce him like poisoned arrows.  Marriage has brought him money, but not the sweet, tender ministrations of loving wifely care, and so he lives on starving in the midst of plenty; dying of thirst, with life’s sweetest fountains eluding his grasp.