“I have fought the battle as long as I can.  It is no use.  I will not suffer my wife and children to share with me a drunkard’s shame.  God-bye.  God have mercy on you and me.”

The next morning, long after the streets had resumed their accustomed activity, and other houses threw wide open their shutters to admit the fragrance of flowers, and the song of birds, and the glad sunshine, and all the joy of life, that house was shut and still.  When the office clerk, missing him, came to seek him, the door was fast.  Neighbors were called in.  A window was forced open.  Lying upon the bed, where he had fallen the night before, lay poor Charlie P. A few drops of blood stained the white coverlet.  It oozed from a bullet wound in the back of his head.  The hand in death still grasped the pistol that fired the fatal shot.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Our Village Library.

To that prayer-meeting and Father Hyatt’s story of Charlie P., Wheathedge owes its library.

“Mr. Laicus,” said Mr. Gear as we came out of the meeting together, “I hope this temperance movement isn’t going to end in a prayer-meeting.  The praying is all very well, but I want to see some work go along with it.”

“Very well,” said I, “what do you propose?”

“I don’t know,” said he.  “But I think we might do something.  I believe in the old proverb.  The gods help those who help themselves.”

That very week Mr. Mapleson called at my house to express the same idea.  “What can we do to shut up Poole’s?” said he.  “It’s dreadful.  Half our young men spend half their evenings there lounging and drinking away their time.”  He proposed half a dozen plans and abandoned them as fast as he proposed them.  He suggested that we organize a Sons of Temperance, and gave it up because neither of us believed in secret societies; suggested organizing a Band of Hope in the Sabbath-school, but withdrew the suggestion on my remarking that the Sabbath-school would not touch the class that made Poole’s bar the busiest place in town; hinted at trying to get John B. Gough, but doubted whether he could be obtained.  I told him I would think it over.  And the next evening I walked up to Poole’s to survey the ground a little.  I found, just as you turn the corner from the Main street to go up the hill, what I had never noticed before-a sign, not very legible from old age and dirt, “Free Reading-room.”  Having some literary predilections, I went in.  A bar-room, with three or four loungers before the counter, occupied the foreground.  In the rear were two round wooden tables.  On one were half a dozen copies of notorious sensation sheets, one or two with infamous illustrations.  A young lad of sixteen was gloating over the pages of one of them.  The other table was ornamented with a backgammon board and a greasy pack of cards.  The atmosphere of the room was composed of the commingled fumes of bad liquor, bad tobacco, kerosene oil and coal gas.  It did not take me long to gauge the merits of the free reading-room.  But I inwardly thanked the proprietor for the suggestion it afforded me.