came from Cuyahoga County; has a mother and sister mainly dependent on him; worked all the summer and fall on one of the public works, and lost half his wages through some dispute between the company and contractor; has no home in Cincinnati, but puts up at D.'s on Water Street, when he can pay, and sometimes sleeps on the floor by the stove when penniless. Has no friend in the city, and no means of leaving it. Finding no work, John leans against a post, and suns himself, and thinks of his poor mother's disappointment at receiving no letter from him. He fears to write, for he has no money to send, and is conscious of having misspent what little he has earned. His heart sinks, his blood grows bitter and savage; he would like to drown thought in drink, quarrel, any thing. A comrade touches him on the shoulder, "Liquor, John?" With a mad alacrity he joins the drink. ers. Had the good Whig who rejected him for his vote employed him, he might have saved a soul alive. SIXTH SCENE. A cold, snowy afternoon, late in January. Dusk is drawing near. Men muffled up to the chin step along quickly, and remark through their coat-collars that it's quite a snowstorm; then drive on again, bending against the cold wind, with visions of hot rolls and buttered toast, of a cosy evening by the fireside, and a soft warm bed, in their minds. One of them is stopped by a man whose legs move under him as he stands, as if all his joints were of the ball-and-socket make; a large rent in the leg of his pantaloons reveals no under garment; another in the seat fails to discover a shirt; his teeth chatter; his whole frame quivers as in an ague; his fingers stand out like icicles. "Stranger," he says, "where can I get warm?" "Go home, go home, my good fellow," answers the other with mingled nausea and pity. "I have no home," growls John Scott; "I'm cold; I've slept out two nights; two nights by the watch, stranger. I'm cold, I tell you; I have not seen a fire for eight hours. As God made you, stranger, where can I get warm?" Two more gentlemen come up, stop, and one asks what the matter is. "O, the man's only drunk!" cries his friend. "Come along, or the muffins will be burnt." They pass on. John Scott looks after them, and mutters something about their being burnt one day. While his eyes are wandering, the person first addressed, feeling himself unable to do any thing, pushes for home. John, muttering curses, and prayers, and promises of amendment, staggers up the street. Soon after dark he was picked up from the middle of the street (where two or three persons had poked him with their canes to see what the matter was, and concluded he was “only drunk ”), and taken to a tavern, by a young, chickenhearted clerk, who was such an enemy to temperance as to pity an intemperate man. SEVENTH SCENE. A small, dark room, unplastered; the crevices of the walls pasted over with leaves from the Bible. A small fire of pine boards (it is late in February). Two men sit by a table playing some game of chance by the light of a candle stuck in a knot-hole. One is John Scott, the other Mike Simmons. Mike was once a boatman, hale and handsome; he is still handsome, but dying of consumption. He was once honest, sober, industrious; he is now a drunkard, gambler, idler, and lives by stealing logs from the saw-mills and lumber from rafts. He keeps a child at a pay school. The door opens, and Mike's wife enters, red in the face, and reeling. She places a jug on the table, and from a heap of crockery and old shoes pulls out a bowl and washes it in the water bucket. Drinking begins. Mike has a job on hand, and wants his wife out of the way; for even such women as she have hearts, and pity the victims in whose midst they walk. The woman is drenched, and thrown into the heap of straw, bedclothes, and children in the corner. The children cry out, and wriggle from under their mother; one squirms out of bed, and is kicked back by the father. Family matters settled, Mike goes on with his game. John Scott is kept on the verge of entire drunkenness by the whiskey, and prevented from going over by well-told tales of theft, robbery, and bloodshed, — exciting enough to rouse him from complete lethargy. About ten a third man enters, after a mysterious tap at the window. The three draw together and speak under their breath. The results of that consultation are not yet evident, but at such moments bold deeds of evil are planned. By some such deed John Scott may yet prove that, when drunk in the street, his case was not that of "only drunk," but that of one hanging between a return to right and destruction. Even now, breathing this tainted atmosphere of whiskey and onions, in which the very candle burns dim, John thinks of his mother! O, were some friend by to help the poor struggling wretch! There is none. Satan smiles at his elbow, and, opposite, Mike smiles in answer, little dreaming that his dear friend and gossip, th eTempter, is exchanging grins with the Death which is now looking from his own sunken and swimming eyes. THE LOST CHILD. IT has been said that the morals of a city depend very much upon the manner in which it is laid out; if irregular, and full of alleys, lanes, and courts, there will inevitably be more of filth and iniquity therein, than if it be open, regular, and airy. High houses and narrow passage-ways seem to breed vicious habits, as dark crevices do foul insects; at any rate, they give shelter and shade. The ideal of a city would be realized when every passage-way was made broad and easy of access. It is an error, therefore, to build a town in squares, for the interiors of the squares become always, in a greater or less degree, sinks. The mistake in the plan of Cincinnati, then, was, that the main squares are not traversed by large passage-ways; and many, that seem without noble and fine, are within foul and terrible to look upon. Under the very windows of the most beautiful and comfortable dwelling-houses of our city are some of the most miserable hovels in existence, unnoticed, because in the interior of a square. In the door-way of an old wooden house, which stands, unseen by the passer-by in the street, in the midst of one of the fine squares of Cincinnati, a white woman, of some thirty years old, sat looking stupidly at the golden sky of the west. The beauty of God's heaven soothed and interested her, though she knew not what influence it was that calmed her spirit. The house was miserably dilapidated; not a window remained whole; the weather-boarding was broken, and the chimney in ruins. Close to the feet of the sitting woman, the hogs were quarrelling for some remnants of her last meal; and upon the ash-heap by her side, a little girl, about four years old, was playing with a yellow, scabby dog. Within, a straw-bed lay in a corner, and a block of wood from some lumber-yard contrasted strangely with a bureau veneered with showy mahogany. "Mother," cried out a ragged and dirt-streaked boy, who came up kicking his furless fur cap before him, “ John ain't nowhere.” - "He is," said the woman, without moving her eyes from the sky; "and if you don't fetch him in quick, mind yourself." The boy gave the dog one kick, that brought forth a simultaneous howl from cur and child, and strolled out into the street again. The twilight faded; the stars looked down upon the seething city, and through the stillness of evening the boatman's song rose from the sluggish river, and was listened to by many an ear far up town. The lady, leaning from her open window, heard it, and ceased fanning herself to catch. the hearty tones; the gentleman, rocking in his piazza, heard it, and his cigar went out as his head kept time with the quick, full notes; the servant-girl caught the sound, and stood, cup and towel in hand, drinking in what reminded her of one who was braving the fever in the Southwest; the poor woman sitting on the threshold of that old frame-house heard that song also, and years were annihilated by it, and she laid her head down upon her greasy apron, and cried as the fallen alone ever do. While the fit was still on her, the boy whom she had sent out came back again, sullen and fierce. "Ile ain't to be had," said he. |