By Rev.  C. H. Mead.

Never did any one have a better start in life than Tom.  Born of Christian parents, he inherited from them no bad defects, moral or physical.  He was built on a liberal plan, having a large head, large hands, large feet, large body, and within all, a heart big with generosity.  His face was the embodiment of good nature, and his laugh was musical and infectious.  Being an only child there was no one to share with him the lavish love of his parents.  They saw in him nothing less than a future President of the United States, and they made every sacrifice to fit him for his coming position.  He was a prime favorite with all, and being a born leader, he was ungrudgingly accorded that position by his playmates at school and his fellows at the university.  He wrestled with rhetoric, and logic, and political economy, and geometry, and came off an easy victor; he put new life into the dead languages, dug among the Greek roots by day and soared up among the stars by night.  None could outstrip him as a student, and he easily held his place at the head of his class.  The dullest scholar found in him a friend and a helper, while the brighter ones found in his example, an incentive to do their best.

In athletic sports, too, he was excelled by none.  He could run faster, jump higher, lift a dumb-bell easier, strike a ball harder, and pull as strong an oar as the best of them.  He was the point of the flying wedge in the game of foot-ball, and woe be to the opponent against whom that point struck.  To sum it all up, Tom was a mental and physical giant, as well as a superb specimen of what that college could make out of a young man.  But unfortunately, it was one of those institutions that developed the mental, trained the physical, and starved the spiritual, and so it came to pass ere his college days were ended, Tom had an enemy, and that enemy was the bottle.

The more respectable you make sin, the more dangerous it is.  An old black bottle in the rough hand of the keeper of a low dive, would have no power to cause a clean young man to swerve from the right course, but he is a hero ten times over, who can withstand the temptation of a wine glass in the jeweled fingers of a beautiful young lady.  Tom’s tempter came in the latter form, and she who might have spurred him on to the highest goal, and whispered in his ear, “look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth its color in the cup, when it moveth itself aright,” started him down a course which made him learn from a terrible experience that “at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.”  Does any one call a glass of wine a small thing?  Read Tom’s story and then call it small, if you dare!  Whatever he did was done with his might, drinking not excepted.  He boasted of his power to drink much and keep sober, while he laughed at the companions who imbibed far less and went to bed drunk.  At first Tom was