The fountain and the bottle comprising thrilling examples of the opposite effects of temperance and intemperance |
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IT'S ONLY A DROP. |
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 | The fountain and the bottle |  |
IT'S ONLY A DROP.
From Chambers Edinburgh Journal
It was a cold winter's night, and though the cottage
where Ellen and Michael, the two surviving
children of old Ben Murphy lived, was always neat
and comfortable, still there was a cloud over the brow
fire. It had obviously been spread not by anger,
but by sorrow. The silence had continued long,
though it was not bitter. At last, Michael drew away
from his sister's eyes, the checked apron she had applied
to them, and taking her hand affectionately
within his own, said, “It isn't for my own sake, Ellen,
though, the Lord knows, I shall be lonesome enough
the long winter nights, and the long summer days,
without your wise saying, and your sweet song, and
your merry laugh, that I can so well remember—ay,
since the time when our poor mother used to seat us
on the new rick, and then, in the innocent pride of
her heart, call father to look at us, and preach to us
against being conceited, at the very time she was making
us proud as peacocks by calling us her blossoms of
beauty, and her heart's blood, and her king and queen.”
“God and the Blessed Virgin make her bed in heaven,
now and for evermore, amen,” said Ellen, at the
same time drawing out her beads, and repeating an
Ave with inconceivable rapidity. “Ah, Mike,” she
added, “that was the mother, and the father too, full
of grace and godliness.”
“True for ye, Ellen, but that's not what I'm afther
now, as you well know, you blushing little rogue of
the world; and sorra a word I'll say against it in the
end, though it's lonesome I'll be on my own hearthstone,
with no one to keep me company but the ould
black cat, that can't see, let alone hear, the craythur!”
“Now,” said Ellen, wiping her eyes, and smiling
her own bright smile, “lave off; ye're just like all the
there's a dale of desate about them—all—every
one of them—and so my mother often said. Now,
you'd better have done, or maybe I'll say something
that will bring, if not the colour to your brown cheek,
a dale more warmth to yer warm heart, than would
be convanient, just by the mention of one Mary—
Mary! what a purty name Mary it is, isn't it?—its a
common name too, and yet you like it none the worse
for that. Do you mind the ould rhyme?—
she's any thing but that to you, any way, brother
Mike. Can't you sit still, and don't be pulling the
hairs out of Pusheen cat's tail, it isn't many there's in
it; and I'd thank you not to unravel the beautiful
English cotton stocking I'm knitting; lave off your
tricks, or I'll make common talk of it, I will, and be
more than even with you, my fine fellow! Indeed,
poor ould Pusheen,” she continued, addressing the
cat with great gravity, “never heed what he says to
you; he has no notion to make you either head or tail
to the house, not he; he won't let you be without a
misthress to give ye your sup of milk, or yer bit of
sop; he won't let you be lonesome, my poor puss;
he's glad enough to swap an Ellen for a Mary, so he
is; but that's a sacret, avourneen; don't tell it to any
one.”
“Any thing for your happiness,” replied the brother,
somewhat sulkily; “but your bachelor has a
lecturing you kept on to me; he has a turn for the
drop, Ellen, you know he has.”
“How spitefully you said that!” replied Ellen;
“and it isn't generous to spake of it when he's not
here to defend himself.”
“You'll not let a word go against him,” said Michael.
“No,” she said, “I will never let ill be spoken of
an absent friend. I know he has a turn for the drop,
but I'll cure him.”
“After he is married,” observed Michael, not very
good naturedly.
“No,” she answered, “before. I think a girl's chance
of happiness is not worth much who trusts to after marriage
reformation. I wont. Didn't I reform you, Mike,
of the shockin' habit you had, of putting every thing
off to the last? And after reforming a brother, who
knows what I may do with a lover? Do you think
that Larry's heart is harder than yours, Mike? Look
what fine vegetables we have in our garden now, all
planted by your own hand, when you come home
from work—planted during the very time which you
used to spend in leaning against the door cheek, or
smoking your pipe, or sleeping over the fire. Look
at the money you got from the agricultural society.”
“That's yours, Ellen,” said the generous-hearted
Mike. I'll never touch a penny of it; but for you
I never should have had it. I'll never touch it.”
“You never shall,” she answered. “I've laid it
every penny out; so that when the young bride comes
to be found in the parish—white table-cloths for Sunday,
a little store of tay and sugar, soap, candles,
starch, every thing good, and plenty of it.”
“My own dear, generous sister!” exclaimed the
young man.
“I shall ever be your sister,” she replied, “and
hers too. She's a good colleen, and worthy my own
Mike; and that's more than I would say to ere another
in the parish. I wasn't in earnest when I said
you'd be glad to get rid of me; so put the pouch,
every bit of it off yer handsome face. And hush!—
whist! will ye? there's the sound of Larry's footsteps
in the bawn—hand me the needles, Mike.”
She braided back her hair with both hands, arranged
the red ribbon, that confined its luxuriance, in
the little glass that hung upon the dresser, and, after
composing her arch laughing features into an expression
of great gravity, sat down, and applied herself
with singular industry to take up the stitches her
brother had dropped, and put on a look of right
maidenly astonishment when the door opened, and
Larry's good-humoured face entered, with the salutation
of “God save all here!” He popped his head in
first, and after gazing around, presented his goodly
person to their view; and a pleasant view it was, for
he was of genuine Irish bearing and beauty—frank,
and manly, and fearless looking. Ellen, the wicked
one, looked up with well feigned astonishment, and
exclaimed, “Oh, Larry, is it you? and who would
have thought of seeing you this blessed night? Ye're
walk across the moor. I cannot think what in the
world makes you walk over that moor so often; you'll
get wet feet, and yer mother 'ill be forced to nurse
you. Of all the walks in the county, the walk across
that moor's the dreariest, and yet ye're always going
it! I wonder you haven't better sense; ye're not
such a chicken now.”
“Well,” interrupted Mike, “it's the women that
bates the world for desaving. Sure she heard yer
step when nobody else could; it's echo struck on
her heart, Larry,—let her deny it. She'll make a
shove off if she can; she'll twist you, and twirl you,
and turn you about, so that you wont know whether
it's on your head or your heels ye're standing. She'll
tossicate yer brains in no time, and be as composed
herself as the dove on her nest in a storm. But ask
her, Larry, the straitforward question, whether she
heard you or not. She'll tell no lie—she never does.”
Ellen shook her head at her brother, and laughed,
and immediately after the happy trio sat down to a
cheerful supper.
Larry was a good tradesman, blythe, and “well to
do” in the world; and had it not been for the one
great fault—an inclination to take “the least taste in
life more” when he had already taken quite enough—
there could not have been found a better match for
good, excellent Ellen Murphy, in the whole kingdom
of Ireland. When supper was finished, the everlasting
whisky-bottle was produced, and Ellen resumed
her knitting. After a time, Larry pressed his suit to
doubtless, with the natural self-conceit of all man
kind, that he was perfectly secure with Ellen; but
though Ellen loved, like all my fair countrywomen,
well, she loved, I am sorry to say, unlike the generality
of my fair countrywomen, wisely, and reminded her
lover that she had seen him intoxicated at the last fair
of Rathcoolin.
“Dear Ellen,” he exclaimed, “it was `only a drop,'
the least taste in life that overcame me. It overtook
me unknowst, quite against my will.”
“Who poured it down yer throat, Larry?”
“Who poured it down my throat is it? why, myself,
to be sure; but are you going to put me to a
three months' penance for that?”
“Larry, will you listen to me, and remember that
the man I marry must be converted before we stand
before the priest. I have no faith whatever in conversions
after.”—
“Oh, Ellen!” interrupted her lover
“It's no use oh Ellening me,” she answered
quickly; “I have made my resolution, and I'll stick
to it.”
“She's as obstinate as ten women,” said her brother.
“There's no use in attempting to contradict her;
she always has had her own way.”
“It's very cruel of you, Ellen, not to listen to reason.
I tell you, a tablespoonful will often upset me.”
“If you know that, Larry, why do you take the
tablespoonful?”
Larry could not reply to this question. He could
temptation, and the overcomingness of the thing, and
it was very hard to be at him so about a trifle.
“I can never think a thing a trifle,” she observed,
“that makes you so unlike yourself; I should wish
to respect you always, Larry, and in my heart I believe
no woman ever could respect a drunkard. I
don't want to make you angry; God forbid you should
ever be one, and I know you are not one yet; but sin
grows mighty strong upon us without our knowledge.
And no matter what indulgence leads to bad; we've
a right to think any thing that does lead to it sinful in
prospect, if not at the present.”
“You'd have made a fine priest, Ellen,” said the
young man, determined, if he could not reason, to
laugh her out of her resolve.
“I don't think,” she replied, archly, “if I was a
priest, that either of you would have liked to come to
me to confession.”
“But Ellen, dear Ellen, sure it's not in positive
downright earnest you are; you can't think of putting
me off on account of that unlucky drop, the least
taste in life, I took at the fair. You could not find it
in your heart. Speak for me, Michael, speak for me.
But I see it's joking you are. Why, Lent will be on
us in no time, and then we must wait till Easter—it's
easy talking.”
“Larry,” interrupted Ellen, “do not you talk your
self into a passion; it will do no good; none in the
world. I am sure you love me, and I confess before
my brother it will be the delight of my heart to return
will only break yourself of that one habit, which you
qualify to your own undoing by fancying, because the
least taste in life makes you what you ought not to be,
that you still take it.”
“I'll take an oath against the whisky, if that will
plase ye, till Christmas.”
“And when Christmas comes, get twice as tipsy as
ever, with joy to think yer oath is out—no?”
“I'll sware any thing you plase.”
“I don't want you to sware at all; there is no use
in a man's taking an oath he is anxious to have a
chance of breaking. I want your reason to be convinced.”
“My darling Ellen all the reason I ever had in my
life is convinced.”
“Prove it by abstaining from taking even a drop,
even the least drop in life, if that drop can make you
ashamed to look your poor Ellen in the face.”
“I'll give it up altogether.”
“I hope you will one of these days, from a conviction
that it is really bad in every way; but not from
cowardice, not because you darn't trust yerself.”
“Ellen, I'm sure ye've some English blood in yer
veins, you're such a reasoner. Irish women don't
often throw a boy off because of a drop; if they did,
it's not many marriage dues his Reverence would
have, winter or summer.”
“Listen to me, Larry, and believe, that, though I
spake this way, I regard you truly; and if I did not,
I'd not take the throuble to tell you my mind.”
“Like Mick Brady's wife, who, whenever she
thrashed him, cried over the blows, and said they were
all for his good,” observed her brother slyly.
“Nonsense!”—listen to me, I say, and I'll tell you
why I am so resolute. It's many a long day since,
going to school, I used to meet—Michael minds her,
too, I'm sure—an old bent woman; they used to call
her the Witch of Ballaghton. Stacy was, as I have
said, very old, entirely withered and white headed,
bent nearly double with age, and she used to be ever
and always muddling about the streams and ditches,
gathering herbs and plants, the girls said to work
charms with; and at first they used to watch, rather
far off, and if they had a good chance of escaping her
tongue and the stones she flung at them, they'd call
she'd make a spring at them sideways like a crab,
and howl, and hoot, and scream, and then they'd be
off like a flock of pigeons from a hawk, and she'd go
on disturbing the green coated waters with her crooked
stick, and muttering words which none, if they heard,
could understand. Stacy had been a well-rared woman,
and knew a dale more than any of us; when
not tormented by the children, she was mighty well
spoken, and the gentry thought a dale more about her
than she did about them; for she'd say there wasn't
one in the country fit to tie her shoe, and tell them
so, too, if they'd call her any thing but Lady Stacy,
which the rale gentry of the place all humoured her
in; but the upstarts, who think every civil word to
an inferior is a pulling down of their own dignity,
would turn up their noses as they passed her, and
maybe she didn't bless them for it.
“One day Mike had gone home before me, and,
coming down the back bohreen, who should I see
moving along it but Lady Stacy; and on she came,
muttering and mumbling to herself, till she got near
me; and, as she did, I heard Master Nixon (the dog
man's[1]
) hound in full cry, and seen him at her heels,
and he over the hedge encouraging the baste to tear
her in pieces. The dog soon was up with her, and
then she kept him off as well as she could with her
crutch, cursing the entire time; and I was very
frightened, but I darted to her side, and, with a wat
off her.
“Master Nixon cursed at me with all his heart;
but I wasn't to be turned off that way. Stacy, herself,
laid about with her staff; but the ugly brute
would have finished her, only for me. I don't suppose
Nixon meant that; but the dog was savage, and
some men like him delight in cruelty. Well, I beat
the dog off; and then I had to help the poor fainting
woman, for she was both faint and hurt. I didn't
much like bringing her here, for the people said she
wasn't lucky; however, she wanted help, and I gave
it. When I got her on the floor,[2]
I thought a drop
of whisky would revive her, and, accordingly, I offered
her a glass. I shall never forget the venom with which
she dashed it on the ground.
“`Do you want to poison me,' she shouted, `afther
saving my life?' When she came to herself a little,
she made me sit down by her side, and fixing her
large gray eyes upon my face, she kept rocking her
body backwards and forwards while she spoke, as
well as I can remember, what I'll try to tell you; but
I can't tell it as she did—that wouldn't be in nature.
`Ellen,' she said, and her eyes fixed in my face, `I
wasn't always a poor lone creature, that every ruffian
who walks the country dare set his cur at. There
was full and plenty in my father's house when I was
young; but before I grew to womanly estate, its walls
were bare and roofless. What made them so?—Drink!
tried to keep himself so that he could not think: he
wanted the courage of a man to look his danger and
difficulty in the face, and overcome it; for, Ellen, mind
my words, the man that will look debt and danger steadily
in the face, and resolve to overcome them, can do so.
He had not means, he said, to educate his children as became
them. He grew not to have means to find them,
or their poor patient mother, the proper necessaries
of life; yet he found the means to keep the whisky
cask flowing, and to answer the bailiff's knocks for
admission by the loud roar of drunkenness, mad as it
was wicked. They got in at last, in spite of the care
taken to keep them out; and there was much fighting,
ay, and blood spilt, but not to death; and while the
riot was a-foot, and we were crying round the deathbed
of a dying mother, where was he?—They had
raised a ten-gallon cask of whisky on the table in the
parlour, and astride on it sat my father, flourishing the
huge pewter funnel in one hand, and the black jack
streaming with whisky in the other; and amid the
fumes of hot punch that flowed over the room, and the
cries and oaths of the fighting, drunken company, his
voice was heard, swearing `he had lived like a king,
and WOULD die like a king.”'
“And your poor mother?” I asked.
“Thank God, she died that night! she died before
worse came. She died on the bed that, before her
corpse was cold, was dragged from under her, through
the strong drink—through the badness of him who
ought to have saved her; not that he was a bad man,
he could not bear his own reflections. And his end
soon came. He didn't die like a king; he died,
smothered in a ditch, where he fell; he died, and was
in the presence of God—how? Oh! there are things
that have had whisky as their beginning, and their
end, that made me as mad as ever it made him! The
man takes a drop, and forgets his starving family; the
woman takes it, and forgets she is a mother and a
wife! It's the curse of Ireland! a bitterer, blacker,
deeper curse than ever was put on it by a foreign
power, or hard made laws!”
“God bless us!” was Larry's half-breathed ejaculation.
“I only repeat ould Stacy's words,” said Ellen;
“you see I never forgot them. `You may think,'
she continued, `that I had had warning enough to
keep me from having any thing to say to those who
were too fond of drink; and I thought I had; but,
somehow, Edward Lambert got round me with his
sweet words, and I was lone and unprotected. I
knew he had a little fondness for the drop, but
in him, young, handsome, and gay-hearted, with
bright eyes and sunny hair, it did not seem like the
horrid thing which had made me shed no tear over my
father's grave. Think of that, young girl: the drink
doesn't make a man a beast at first, but it will do so
before it's done with him—it will do so before it's
done with him. I had enough power over Edward,
and enough memory of the past, to make him swear
against it, except so much at such and such a time,
used to entice him, and another used to entice him,
and I am not going to say but I might have managed
him differently; I might have got him off it—gently,
may be; but the pride got the better of me, and I
thought of the line I came of, and how I had married
him who wasn't my equal, and such nonsense, which
always breeds disturbance betwixt married people;
and I used to rave, when, may be, it would have
been wiser if I had reasoned. Any way, things didn't
go smooth—not that he neglected his employment;
he was industrious, and sorry enough when the fault
was done; still he would come home often the worse
for drink—and now that he's dead and gone, and no
finger is stretched to me but in scorn or hatred, I think
may be I might have done better; but, God defend
me, the last was hard to bear.' Oh, boys,” said Ellen,
“if you had only heard her voice when she said that,
and seen her face—poor ould Lady Stacy, no wonder
she hated the drop, no wonder she dashed down the
whisky.”
“You kept this mighty close, Ellen,” said Mike;
“I never heard it before.”
“I do not like coming over it,” she replied; “the
last is hard to tell. The girl turned pale while she
spoke, and Lawrence gave her a cup of water. “It
must be told,” she said; “the death of her father
proved the effects of deliberate drunkenness. What
I have to say, shows what may happen from being
even once unable to think or act.
“`I had one child,' said Stacy, `one, a darlint, blue-eyed,
never knew any so good. She was almost three years
ould, and he was fond of her—he said he was, but it's
a quare fondness that destroys what it ought to save.
It was the pattern of Lady-day, and well I knew that
Edward would not return as he went; he said he
would, he almost swore he would; but the promise
of a man given to drink has no more strength in it than
a rope of sand. I took sulky, and wouldn't go; if I
had, maybe it wouldn't have ended so. The evening
came on, and I thought my baby breathed in her cradle;
I took the candle and went over to look at her;
her little face was red; and when I laid my cheek
close to her lips so as not to touch them, but to feel her
breath, it was hot—very hot; she tossed her arms,
and they were dry and burning. The measles were
about the country, and I was frightened for my child.
It was only half a mile to the doctor's; I knew every
foot of the road; and so leaving the door on the latch,
I resolved to tell him how my darlint was, and thought
I should be back before my husband's return. Grass,
you may be sure, didn't grow under my feet. I ran
with all speed, and wasn't kept long, the doctor said—
though it seemed long to me. The moon was down
when I came home, though the night was fine. The
cabin we lived in was in a hollow; but when I was
on the hill, and looked down where I knew it stood a
dark mass, I thought I saw a white light fog coming
out of it; I rubbed my eyes, and darted forward as a
wild bird flies to its nest when it hears the scream of
the hawk in the heavens. When I reached the door,
sure enough, white and thick; blind with that and
terror together, I rushed to my child's cradle. I found
my way to that, in spite of the burning and the smothering.
But Ellen—Ellen Murphy, my child, the
rosy child whose breath had been hot on my cheek
only a little while before, she was nothing but a cinder.
Mad as I felt, I saw how it was in a minute.
The father had come home, as I expected; he had
gone to the cradle to look at his child, had dropped the
candle into the straw, and, unable to speak or stand,
had fallen down and asleep on the floor, not two yards
from my child. Oh, how I flew to the doctor's with
what had been my baby! I tore across the country
like a banshee; I laid it in his arms; I told him if he
didn't put life in it, I'd destroy him and his house.
He thought me mad, for there was no breath, either
cold or hot, coming from its lips then. I couldn't kiss
it in death; there was nothing left of my child to kiss;
think of that! I snatched it from where the doctor
had laid it; I cursed him, for he looked with disgust
at my purty child. The whole night long I wandered
in the woods of Newtownbarry, with that burden
at my heart.”'
“But her husband, her husband!” inquired Larry
in accents of horror; “what became of him?—did
she leave him in the burning without calling him to
himself?”
“No,” answered Ellen; “I asked her, and she
told me that her shrieks she supposed roused him
from the suffocation in which he must but for them
was found soon after by the neighbours, and lived
long after, but only to be a poor heart-broken man,
for she was mad for years through the country; and
many a day after she told me that story, my heart
trembled like a willow leaf. `And now, Ellen Murphy,'
wonder I threw from yer hand as poison the glass you
offered me? And do you know why I have tould
you what tears my heart to come over?—because I
wish to save you, who showed me kindness, from
what I have gone through. It's the only good I can
do ye, and, indeed, it's long since I cared to do good.
Never trust a drinking man; he has no guard on his
words, and will say that of his nearest friend, that
would destroy him soul and body. His breath is hot
as the breath of the plague; his tongue is a foolish,
as well as a fiery serpent. Ellen, let no drunkard
become your lover, and don't trust to promises; try
them, prove them all, before you marry.”'
“Ellen, that's enough,” interrupted Larry. “I
have heard enough—the two proofs are enough without
words. Now, hear me. What length of punishment
am I to have? I won't say that, for, Nell,
there's a tear in your eye that says more than words.
Look—I'll make no promises—but you shall see; I'll
wait yer time; name it; I'll stand the trial.”
And I am happy to say, for the honour and credit
of the country, that Larry did stand the trial—his
resolve was fixed; he never so much as tasted whisky
from that time, and Ellen had the proud satisfaction
of knowing she had saved him from destruction.
They were not, however married till after
Easter. I wish all Irish maidens would follow Ellen's
example. Woman could do a great deal to prove that
“the least taste in life” is a great taste too much!—
that “ONLY A DROP” is a temptation fatal if unresisted.
| The fountain and the bottle | |