campaign are the drinkers. The same is true in every effort of life which demands the best energy of a man. To the man who is actively engaged in responsible work, who must have at his command the best that is in him, at its best-to him I would, with all the emphasis that I possess, advise and urge, leave drink alone-absolutely. He who drinks is deliberately disqualifying himself for advancement. Personally I refuse to take such a risk. I do not drink."

Sir Frederic Treves, Surgeon in Ordinary to the King, in describing the relief column that moved on to Ladysmith, said: "The first who dropped out were the drinkers, and they dropped out as clearly as if they had been labeled with a big letter on their backs."

The modern athlete cannot afford to indulge, especially if he is a member of an athletic team and is obliged to play up to the abstainer's standard of efficiency. The manager of a baseball team said: "A boozer is out of the question now on any baseball team, and that is understood."

Appeal for Temperance

BY HENRY W. GRADY.

My friends, hesitate before you vote liquor back into Atlanta, now that it is shut out. Don't trust it. It is powerful, aggressive and universal in its attacks. Tonight it enters an humble home to strike the roses from a woman's cheek, and to-morrow it challenges this Republic in the halls of Congress. To-day it strikes a crust from the lips of a starving child, and to-morrow levies tribute from the Government itself. There is no cottage in this city humble enough to escape it-no palace strong enough to shut it out. It defies the law when it cannot coerce suffrage. It is flexible to cajole, but merciless in victory. It is the mortal enemy of peace and order. The despoiler of men, the terror of women, the cloud that shadows the face of children, the demon that has dug more graves and sent more souls unshrived to judgment than all the pestilences that have wasted life since God sent the plagues to Egypt, and all the wars since Joshua

stood beyond Jericho. O, my countrymen! loving God and humanity, do not bring this grand old city again under the dominion of that power. It can profit no man by its return. It can uplift no industry, revive no interest, remedy no wrong. You know that it cannot. It comes to ruin, and it shall profit mainly by the ruin of your sons or mine. It comes to mislead human souls and crush human hearts under its rumbling wheels. It comes to bring gray-haired mothers down in shame and sorrow to their graves. It comes to turn the wife's love into despair and her pride into shame. It comes to still the laughter on the lips of little children. It comes to stifle all the music of the home and fill it with silence and desolation. It comes to ruin your body and mind, to wreck your home, and it knows that it must measure its prosperity by the swiftness and certainty with which it wreaks this work.

The Snakes*

BY EUGENE FIELD.

These are the snakes that Rowdy saw:
Some were green and some were white,
Some were black as the spawn of night;
Some were yellow;

And one big fellow

Had monstrous blotches of angry red,
And a scarlet welt on his slimy head;
And other snakes that Rowdy saw
Were of every hue

From pink to blue,

And the longer he looked the bigger they grew!

An old he-snake with a frowzy head
Was one of the snakes that Rowdy saw,
This old he-snake he grinned and leered
When he saw that Rowdy was afeared;
And he ran out his tongue in frightful wise

* From "Sharps and Flats," published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.

As he batted his fireless dead-fish eyes;
And he lashed his tail

In the moonlight pale,

And he tickled his jaw with his left hind paw-
Did this old he-snake that Rowdy saw!

These hideous snakes that Rowdy saw
Wriggled and twisted
Wherever they listed,
Straightway glided

Or ambled one-sided.

There were some of those things
That had fiery wings-

Yes, some of the snakes that Rowdy saw

Hummed round in the air

With their eye-balls aglare

And their whiskers aflare;

And they hissed their approval of Rowdy's despair!

And some of the snakes that Rowdy saw

Had talons like bats,

And looked like a cross between buzzards and rats!
They crawled from his boots, and they sprawled on the

floor;

They sat on the mantel and perched on the door,
And grinned all the fiercer the louder he swore!

Out, out of his boots

Came the damnable brutes

These murdersome snakes that Rowdy saw!

Strange cries they uttered,

And poison they sputtered

As they crawled or they fluttered

This way and that

Their venom they spat,

Till Rowdy had doubts as to where he was at.

They turned round his legs, and encircled his waist; His arms and his neck and his breast they embraced; They hissed in his ears, and they spat in his eyes, And with their foul breaths interrupted his cries. Blue serpents and green,

Red, yellow and black,
Of as hideous mien

As ever was seen,

Girt him round, fore and back,

And higgling,

And wriggling,

With their slimy and grimy preponderance they bore Rowdy down to the floor. He remembers no more.

The Poor Men's Club*

"All baggage," said the representative, "is at the risk of the owner in this world. I am for equal laws." The meaning of all that he said was, that his constituents loved their drams, and if he voted to shut up the "poor men's clubs," the poor men would vote him out of his seat.

Yet whoever has seen a gin-palace in London understands what the honorable representative meant. The poor, jaded, famished sad man or woman emerges from the squalor and gloom and chill of the slum which is called home, and there, at the corner of the busy, bustling street, a blaze of light and warmth and society and comfort, is the splendid palace. Vaguely the poor wanderer feels that he is the gloomy squalor that he has left, and that the dram will transform him into this magnificence and ease.

The temptation is enormous. It has a thousand subtle allies in the appetites and imagination. Its consequences cannot be tolerated; how can they be avoided? It is very plausible and pretty to call a grog-shop the poor man's club; but follow the poor man home, good Mr. Representative, and say upon your honor whether you think that the husband and father may rightfully stupefy himself into a forgetfulness of the woes which his stupefaction makes inconceivably sharper for his family! If it is the poor man's club, it is also the poor woman's. Let them comfort themselves at their cluband if the children starve and freeze, what then?

*From "Editor's Easy Chair," Harper's Magazine, January, 1870.

T

Kid McDuff's Girl*

BY JACOB RIIS.

HE clinking of glasses and the shuffle of cowhide boots on the sanded floor outside grew louder, and was muffled again as the door leading to the bar was opened and shut by a young woman. She lingered doubtfully on the threshold a moment, then walked with unsteady step across the room toward the corner where the corpse sat. The light that struggled in from the gloomy street fell upon her and showed that she trembled, as if with the ague. Yet she was young, not over twenty-five; but on her heavy eyes and sodden features there was the stamp death had just blotted from the other's face with the memory of her sins. Yet, curiously blended with it, not yet smothered wholly, there was something of the child, something that had once known a mother's love and pity.

"Poor Kid," she said, stopping beside the body and sinking heavily in a chair. "He will be sorry, anyhow." "Who is Kid?" I asked.

"Why, Kid McDuff! You know him? His brother Jim keeps the saloon on Street. Everybody knows Kid."

"Well, what was she to Kid?" I asked, pointing to the corpse.

"His girl," she said, promptly. "An' he stuck to her till he was pulled for the job he didn't do; then he had to let her slide. She stuck to him, too, you bet.

"Annie wasn't no more nor thirteen when she was tuk away from home by the Kid," the girl went on, talking as much to herself as to me. The policeman nodded in his chair. "He kep' her the best he could, 'ceptin' when he was sent up on the Island the time the gang went back on him. Then she kinder drifted. But she was all right agin he come back and tuk to keepin' bar for his brother Jim. Then he was pulled for that

* From "The Children of the Poor," by Jacob A. Riis, published by Scribners, New York.