He had, previous to his entering the Medical School, neither smoked nor drank, and even when there, though he was almost alone in this respect, his companions found it impossible to tempt him. His mother had suffered so much from drink that she had taught him to shrink from even a glass that contained it as he would from a rattlesnake. But visiting one day at an old friend of his mother's, who was at that time residing in Toronto, a glass of wine was placed before him; and as all the rest drank, he, through fear of being laughed at for being singular, drank too. He would, no doubt, have passed through the ordeal unscathed, had not the eldest daughter of his host, a handsome young girl of eighteen, said to him, when she saw he hesitated, "Take a glass, Charley; it will do you good, and cannot possibly do you any harm." Now, he had conceived a warm attachment for her, and had every reason to believe that his attentions were not distasteful to her; so, when she made the remark, he no longer hesitated, but took the fatal first glass. As he and a companion were on their way home from Mr. Fulton's to their boarding-house, the companion said: "Come, Charley, let us go into Frank's and take a glass of ale;" and, since he had taken the wine, it strangely presented itself to his consciousness as a reason why he should not refuse to take the beer. Thus Satan leads us on by first tempting us to transgress, then making our first sin an argument to sweep away all objections in regard to committing others. Dalton took the ale; and the enemy having broken down the barriers of his temperance principles, it was not long ere he had full possession of the citadel. In fact, in a short time after he had taken his first glass, he and several of his fellow-students had, what they termed, "a regular spree." His mother, fortunately for her, did not live to hear of her son's sad fall; for, as she was sitting in her easy chair one day, she was suddenly seized with a pain near her heart, asked to be assisted to bed, and before the doctor could arrive she was dead. "Died of heart disease," said the doctor; and then he added: "There is no doubt it resulted from her husband's death. She has never recovered from the shock; and though she has lived for years, she might have dropped off at any moment if she had been the least excited." But she received her call home while sitting in her chair reading the 14th chapter of St. John's Gospel; asked to be carried to her bed, and, after being propped up by pillows, she said to her attendant, "Elizabeth, I think I am dying; tell Charley my last thoughts were of him." And then, looking heavenward, she murmured, "God bless and guard my own dear boy," and in another moment she was dead. But "the silver cord was loosed" as if by seraph fingers, and "the golden bowl was broken" so gently that she scarcely felt the stroke of the Death Angel. They laid her to rest while yet in her prime by the side of the husband of her youth.