New Temperance Tales. No. 1: The Son of My Friend | Page 8

hands
pointing to half-past two, the time, in all probability, when he fell into
the water. The diamond pin was in his scarf, and his pocket-book in his
pocket, unrifled. He had not been robbed and murdered. So much was
certain. To all it was plain that the bewildered young man, left to
himself, had plunged on blindly through the storm, going he knew not
whither, until he reached the wharf. The white sheet of snow lying over
everything hid from eyes like his the treacherous margin, and he
stepped, unheeding, to his death! It was conjectured that his body had
floated, by an incoming tide, under the wharf, and that his clothes had
caught in the logs and held it there for so long a time.
Certainty is always better than doubt. On the Sunday after the saddest
funeral it has ever been my lot to attend, Mrs. Martindale appeared for
the first time in church. I did not see her face, for she kept her heavy
black veil closely drawn. On the following Sunday she was in the
family pew again, but still kept her face hidden. From friends who
visited her (I did not call again after my first denial) I learned that she
had become calm and resigned.
To one of these friends she said, "It is better that he should have died
than live to be what I too sadly fear our good society would have made
him--a social burden and disgrace. But custom and example were all

against him. It was at the house of one of my oldest and dearest friends
that wine enticed him. The sister of my heart put madness in his brain,
and then sent him forth to meet a death he had no skill left to avoid."
Oh, how these sentences cut and bruised and pained my heart, already
too sore to bear my own thoughts without agony!
What more shall I write? Is not this unadorned story sad enough, and
full enough of counsel and warning? Far sooner would I let it sleep, and
go farther and farther away into the oblivion of past events; but the
times demand a startling cry of warning. And so, out of the dark depths
of the saddest experience of my life, I have brought this grief, and
shame, and agony to the light, and let it stand shivering in the face of
all men.

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