years every thing went on pleasantly.  The farm was a very garden spot, and had increased from thirty to sixty acres by the purchase of contiguous lands.  Then a change became apparent.  Foster took more interest than formerly in what was going on in the village near by.  He attended the various political meetings held at the “Travellers’ Rest,” and was a prominent man on training and election days.  After a while, his wife began to look on these days with a troubled feeling, for they generally sent him home in a sad plight; and it took nearly a week for him to get settled down again to his work.  Thus the declension began, and its progress was too sadly apparent to the eyes of Mrs. Foster, even before others, less interested than herself, observed it.  At the end of ten years from the happy wedding day, the farm, now more like a wilderness than a beautiful garden, was seized and sold for debt.  There were no friends to step in and go Foster’s security, and thus save his property from sacrifice.  The father of his wife was dead, and his own friends, even if they had not lost confidence in him, were unable to render any assistance.

The rented farm upon which Foster went with his family, after being sold out, was cultivated with no more industry than his own had been of late years.  The man had lost all ambition, and was yielding himself a slave to the all-degrading appetite for drink.  At first, his wife opposed a gentle remonstrance; but he became impatient and angry at a word, and she shrank back into herself, choosing rather to bear silently the ills of poverty and degradation, which she saw were rapidly approaching, than to run the risk of having unkindness, from one so tenderly loved, added thereto.

Affliction came with trouble.  Death took from the mother’s arms, in a single year, three children.  The loss of one was accompanied by a most painful, yet deeply warning circumstance.  The father came home from the village one evening, after having taken a larger quantity of liquor than usual.  While the mother was preparing supper, he took the babe that lay fretting in the cradle, and hushed its frettings in his arms.  While holding it, overcome with what he had been drinking, he fell asleep, and the infant rolled upon the floor, striking its head first.  It awoke and screamed for a minute or two, and then sank into a heavy slumber, and did not awake until the next morning.  Then it was so sick, that a physician had to be called.  In a week it died of brain fever, occasioned, the doctor said, by the fall.

For a whole month not a drop of liquor passed the lips of the rebuked and penitent father.  Even in that short time the desert places of home began to put forth leaves, and to give promise of sweet buds and blossoms; and the grieving mother felt that out of this great sorrow was to come forth joy.  Alas! that even a hope so full of sadness should be doomed to disappointment.  In a moment of temptation her husband fell, and fell into a lower deep.  Then, with more rapid steps the downward road was traversed.  Five more years of sorrow sufficed to do the work of suffering and degradation.  There was another seizure for debt, and the remnant of stock, with nearly all their furniture, was taken and sold.  The rented farm had to be given up; with this, the hope of gaining even sufficient food for her little ones died in the wretched mother’s mind.