“For their sakes, if not for mine, Jonas, sign the pledge again,” she said, while her voice trembled, and then became choked, as she leaned her head upon his shoulder.

“You have conquered!  I will sign!” he whispered in her ear.

Eagerly she lifted her head, arid looked into his face with a glance of wild delight.

“O, how happy this poor heart will again be!” she ejaculated, clasping her hands together, and looking upwards with a joyous smile.

In a few minutes, a pledge of total abstinence from all kinds of intoxicating drinks, was written out and signed.  While her husband was engaged in doing this, Mrs. Marshall stood looking down upon each letter as it was formed by his pen, eager to see his name subscribed.  When that was finally done; she leaned forward on the table at which he wrote, swayed to and fro for a moment or two, and then sank down upon the floor, lost to all consciousness of external things.

From that hour to this, Jonas Marshall has been as true to his second pledge, even in thought, as the needle to the pole.  So dreadful seems the idea of its violation, that the bare recollection of his former dereliction, makes him tremble.

“It was a severe remedy,” he says, sometimes, in regard to his broken legs; “and proved eminently successful.  But for that, I should have been utterly lost.”

THE WANDERER’S RETURN.

A THANKSGIVING STORY.

A MAN, who at first sight, a casual observer would have thought at least forty or fifty years of age, came creeping out of an old, miserable-looking tenement in the lower part of Cincinnati, a little while after night-fall, and, with bent body and shuffling gait, crossed the street an angle; and, after pausing for a few moments before a mean frame building, in the windows of which decanters of liquor were temptingly displayed, pushed open the door and entered.

It was early in November.  Already the leaves had fallen, and there was, in the aspect of nature, a desolateness that mirrored itself in the feelings.  Night had come, hiding all this, yet by no means obliterating the impression which had been made, but measurably increasing it; for, with the darkness had begun to fall a misty rain, and the rising wind moaned sadly among the eaves.

A short time after sundown the man, to whom we have just referred, came home to the comfortless-looking house we have seen him leaving.  All day he had turned a wheel in a small manufactory; and when his work was done, he left, what to him was a prison-house, and retired to the cheap but wretched boarding-place he had chosen, where were congregated about a dozen men of the lowest class.  He did not feel happy.  That was impossible.  No one who debases himself by intemperance can be happy; and this man had gone down, step by step, until he attained a depth of degradation most sad to contemplate.  And yet he was not thirty years old!  After supper he went out, as usual, to spend the evening in drinking.