out of danger when we find we are sailing too swiftly with the stream."

"Young men, ahoy!"

"What is it?"

"The rapids are below you. Now see the water foaming all around you!-see how fast you go! Now hard up the helm!-quick! quick!-pull for your very lives! -pull till the blood starts from your nostrils and the veins stand like whipcords upon the brow! Set the mast in the socket; hoist the sail!"

Ah! it is too late. Shrieking, cursing, howling, blaspheming, over you go; and thousands thus go over every year by the power of evil habits, declaring, "When I find out that it is injuring me, then I will give it up.” The power of evil habit is deceptive and fascinating, and the man by coming to false conclusions argues his way down to destruction.

O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil! O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts! To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast! O strange! Every inordinate cup is unblest, and the ingredient is a devil.-Othello. Act II, Scene III.

The Luck of the Bogans*

M

BY SARAH ORNE JEWETT.

IKE BOGAN was a middle-aged man, and he and his wife looked somewhat elderly as they went to their pew in the broad aisle on Sunday morning. Danny usually came too, and the girls, but Dan looked contemptuous as he sat next his father and said his prayers perfunctorily. Sometimes he was not there at all, and Mike had a heavy heart under his stiff best coat. He was richer than any other member of Father Miles' parish, and he was known and respected everywhere as a good citizen. Even the most ardent believers in the temperance cause were known to say that little mischief would be done if all the rumsellers were such men as Mr. Bogan. He was generous, and in his limited way public spirited. He did his duty to his neighbor as he saw it. Everyone used liquor more or less, somebody must sell it, but a low groggery was as much a thing of shame to him as to any man. He never sold to boys, or to men who had had too much already. His shop was clean and wholesome, and in the evening, when a dozen or more of his respectable acquaintances gathered after work for a social hour or two and a glass of whiskey to rest and cheer them after exposure, there was not a little good talk about affairs from their point of view, and plenty of honest fun.

"Whisper now!" said Jerry one night, poking his great head closer to his friend, "the divil of all them young fellows is young Dan Bogan, Mike's son. Sorra a bit o' good is all his schoolin', and Mike's heart'll be soon broke from him. I see him goin' about wid his nose in the air. He's a pritty boy, but the divil is in him, an' 'tis he ought to have been a praste wid his chances and Father Miles himself tarkin and tarkin wid him, tryin' to make him a glory of pride to his people after all they did for him. There was niver a spade in his hand to touch the ground yet. Look at his poor

* Abridged from the story in "Scribner's Magazine."

father now! Look at Mike, that's grown old and gray since winther time." And they turned their eyes to the bar to refresh memories with the sight of the disappointed face behind it.

There was a rattling at the door-latch just then, and loud voices outside; and as the old men looked, young Dan Bogan came stumbling into the shop. Behind him were two low fellows, the worst in the town. They had all been drinking more than was good for them, and for the first time Mike Bogan saw his only son's boyish face reddened and stupid with whiskey. It had been an unbroken law that Dan should keep out of the shop with his comrades; now he strode forward with an absurd travesty of manliness and demanded liquor for himself and his friends at his father's hands.

Mike staggered, his eyes glared with anger. His fatherly pride made him long to uphold the poor boy before so many witnesses. He reached for a glass, then he pushed it away-and with a quick step reached Dan's side, caught him by his collar and held him.

The angry man pointed his son's companions to the door, and after a moment's hesitation they went skulking out, and father and son disappeared up the stairway. Dan was a coward, he was glad to be thrust into his own bedroom upstairs, his head was stupid, and he muttered only a feeble revenge. Several of Mike Bogan's customers had kindly disappeared when he returned trying to look the same as ever; but one after another the great tears rolled down his cheeks. He never had faced despair until now; he turned his back to the men, and fumbled aimlessly among the bottles on the shelf. Some one came in, unconscious of the pitiful scene, and impatiently repeated his order to the shopkeeper.

"God help me, boys; I can't sell more this night," he said, brokenly. "Go home now, will ye, and lave me to myself."

They were glad to go, though it cut the evening short. Jerry Bogan bungled his way last with his two canes. "Sind the b'y to say," he advised, in a gruff whisper. "Sind him out wid a good captin now, Mike, 'twill make a man of him yet."

A man of him yet! Alas, alas, for the hopes that had been growing so many years. Alas for the pride of a

simple heart, alas for the day Mike Bogan came away from sunshiny old Bantry, with his baby son in his arms for the sake of making that son a gentleman.

Winter had fairly set in, but the snow had not come, and the street was bleak and cold. The wind was stinging men's faces and piercing the wooden houses. A hard night for sailors coming on the coast-a bitter night for the poor people everywhere.

From one house and another the lights went out in the street where the Bogans lived. At last there was no other lamp than theirs, in a window that lighted the outer stairs. Sometimes a woman's shadow passed across the curtain and waited there, drawing it away from the panes a moment as if to listen the better for a footstep that did not come. Poor Biddy had waited many a night beside this. Her husband was far from well; the doctor said that his heart was not working right, and that he must be very careful; but the truth was that Mike's heart was almost broken by grief. Dan was going the downhill road, he had been drinking harder and harder, and spending a great deal of money. He had smashed more than one carriage and lamed more than one horse from the livery stables, and he had kept the lowest company in vilest dens.

There was a sound in the street at last, but it was not of one man's stumbling feet, but of many. Biddy was stiff with cold, she had slept long, and it was almost day. She rushed with strange apprehension to the doorway, and stood with the flaring lamp in her hand at the top of the stairs. The voices were suddenly hushed. "Go for Father Miles!" said somebody in a hoarse voice; and she heard the words. They were carrying a burden; they brought it up to the mother who waited. In their arms lay her son stone dead; he had been stabbed in a fight; he had struck a man down who had sprung back at him like a tiger. Dan, little Dan, was dead; the luck of the Bogans, the end was here, and a wail that pierced the night and chilled the hearts that heard it was the first message of sorrow to the poor father in his uneasy sleep.

"Is my son dead, then?" asked Mike Bogan of Bantry, with a piteous quiver of the lip, and nobody spoke. There was something glistening and awful about his pleasant Irish face. He tottered where he stood, he

caught at a chair to steady himself. "The luck o' the Bogans, was it?" and he smiled strangely; then a fierce hardness came across his face, and changed it utterly. "Come down! come down!" he shouted, and snatching the key of the shop went down the stairs himself with great sure-footed leaps. What was in Mike? Was he crazy with grief? They stood out of his way, and saw him fling bottle after bottle and shatter them against the wall. They saw him roll one cask after another to the doorway, and out into the street in the gray light of morning and break through the staves with a heavy axe. Nobody dared to restrain his fury-there was a devil in him, they were afraid of the man in his blinded rage. The odor of his carefully chosen stock of whiskey and gin filled the cold air. Some of them would have stolen the wasted liquor if they could, but no man there dared to step forward; and it was not until the tall figure of Father Miles came along the street, and the patient eyes that seemed always keeping vigil, and the calm voice with its flavor of Bantry brogue, came to Mike Bogan's help, that he let himself be taken out of the wretched shop and away from the spilt liquors to the shelter of his home.

Sobriety*

Vice-Admiral Beresford, of the English navy, has said: "I do not believe that alcohol in any form has ever done or will do anyone any good. I am now sixty years old, and since I have entirely given up wine, spirits and beer, I find I can do as much work, or more, physically and mentally, than I could do when I was thirty."

Moltke, himself an abstainer, said: "Beer is a far more dangerous enemy to Germany than all the armies of France." The President of the United States, the Hon. William H. Taft, when Secretary of War, said: "With hardly an exception, the men who are incapacitated first during the preliminary activities of any

* From "America Sober," by Samuel J. Barrows. in "The Outlook," February 20, 1909.

Published