“Oh, Agnes,” she had often said to me, with eyes full of tears, “it is not the dread of his death that troubles me most.  I have tried to adjust that sad event between myself and God.  In our fearful crisis he belongs to his country.  I could not withhold him, though my heart seemed breaking when I let him go.  I live in the daily anticipation of a telegram announcing death or a terrible wound.  Yet that is not the thing of fear I dread; but something worse—­his moral defection.  I would rather he fell in battle than come home to me with manhood wrecked.  What I most dread is intemperance.  There is so much drinking among officers.  It is the curse of our army.  I pray that he may escape; yet weep, and tremble, and fear while I pray.  Oh, my friend I think his fall into this terrible vice would kill me.”

Alas for my friend!  Her son came home to her with tainted breath and fevered blood.  It did not kill her.  Love held her above despair, and gave her heart a new vitality.  She must be a savior; not a weak mourner over wrecked hopes.

With what a loving care and wise discretion did she set herself to work to withdraw her son from the dangerous path in which his feet were walking! and she would have been successful, but for one thing.  The customs of society were against her.  She could not keep him away from the parties and evening entertainments of her friends; and here all the good resolutions she had led him to make were as flax fibres in the flame of a candle.  He had no strength to resist when wine sparkled and flashed all around him, and bright eyes and ruby lips invited him to drink.  It takes more than ordinary firmness of principle to abstain in a fashionable company of ladies and gentlemen, where wine and brandy flow as water.  In the case of Albert Martindale, two things were against him.  He was not strong enough to set himself against any tide of custom, in the first place; and in the second, he had the allurement of appetite.

I knew all this, when, with my own hand, I wrote on one of our cards of invitation, “Mr. and Mrs. Martindale and family;” but did not think of it, until the card was written.  As I laid it aside with the rest, the truth flashed on me and sent a thrill of pain along every nerve.  My heart grew sick and my head faint, as thoughts of the evil that might come to the son of my friend, in consequence of the temptation I was about to throw in his way, rushed through my mind.  My first idea was to recall the card, and I lifted it from the table with a half-formed resolution to destroy it.  But a moment’s reflection changed this purpose.  I could not give a large entertainment and leave out my nearest friend and her family.

The pain and wild agitation of that moment were dreadful.  I think all good spirits and angels that could get near my conscious life strove with me, for the sake of a soul in peril, to hold me back from taking another step in the way I was going; for it was not yet too late to abandon the party.