“I cannot do my work,” said he, “without a little, and a little is enough to overset me.  I am not a hard drinker, Pastor, indeed I am not.  But half a glass of liquor will sometimes almost craze me.”

I told him he must give up the little.  For him there was but one course of safety, that of total abstinence.  He was reluctant to come to it.  His father’s sideboard was never empty.  It was hard to put aside the notions of hospitality which he had learned in his childhood, and adopt the principles of a total abstinence, which he had always been taught to ridicule.  However, he resolved bravely, and went away from my study, as I fondly hoped, a saved man.

I had not then learned, as I have since, the meaning of the declaration, “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

I saw him every few days.  He never showed any signs of liquor.  I asked him casually, as I had opportunity, how he was getting along.  He always answered, “Well.”  I sounded others cautiously.  No one suspected him of any evil habit.  I concluded he had conquered it.  Though I did not lose him from my thoughts or prayers, I grew less anxious.  He kept his Bible-class, which grew in numbers and in interest.  Spring came, and I relaxed a little my labors, as that climate-no matter where it was, to me the climate was bad enough-required it.  Despite the caution, the subtle malaria laid hold of me.  I fought for three weeks a hard battle with disease.  When I arose from my bed the doctor forbade all study and all work for six weeks at least.  No minister can rest in his own parish.  My people understood that, as parishes do not always.  One bright spring day, one of my deacons called, and put a sealed envelope into my hand to be opened when he had left.  It contained a check for my traveling expenses, and an official note from the officers of the church bidding me go and spend it.  In three days I was on my way to the White Mountains.  It was there my wife’s hurried note told me the story of Charlie’s death.  And this was it: 

The habit had proved too strong for his weak will.  He had resumed drinking.  No one knew it but his wife and one confidential friend.  He rarely took much; never so much as to be brutal at home, or unfit for business at the office; but enough to prove to him that he was not his own master.  The shame of his bondage he felt keenly, powerless as he felt himself to break the chains.  The week after I left home his wife left also for a visit to her father’s.  She took the children, one a young babe three months old, with her.  Mr. P. was to follow her in a fortnight.  She never saw him again.  One night he went to his solitary home.  Possibly he had been drinking-no one ever knew-opened his photograph album, covered his own photograph with a piece of an old envelope, that it might no longer look upon the picture of his wife on the opposite page, and wrote her, on a scrap of paper torn from a letter, this line of farewell: