“I told you she made those pretty habit shirts for me. They were not in fashion in those days if you will recollect. The first summer after my debut in society I passed at Milton. I never shall forget the second evening of my visit. If you recollect, there was a great temperance movement through all our towns and villages just about that time. Reformed inebriates had become the apostles of temperance, and went from village to village, rousing the inhabitants by their unlearned but wonderful eloquence. Mass meetings were held in the town-ball at Milton nightly, and by uncle’s invitation, for he went heart and hand with the newly awakened spirit of reform, aunt and myself accompanied him to one of these strange gatherings. It was with the greatest difficulty we could get a seat. Rough laborers, with their wives and children, crowded side by side with the _élite_ of the little place; boys of every age and size filled up the interstices, with a strange variety of faces and expressions. The speaker of the evening was introduced just as we entered. He was tall, with a wan, haggard-looking face, and the most brilliant, flashing eyes I ever saw. A few months ago he had been on outcast from society, and now, with a frame weakened by past excesses, but with a spirit as strong as that which animated the old reformers, he stood forth, going as it were ‘from house to house, saying peace be unto you.’ Peace which had fled from his own hearth when he gave way to temptation, but which now returning urged him to bear glad tidings to other homes. “I never listened to such strange and thrilling eloquence. I have seen Fanny Kemble as Portia plead with Shylock with all the energy of justice, and the force of her passionate nature, but though that was beyond my powers of conception, I was not moved as now. With what touching pathos he recounted the sorrows, the wasting, mournful want endured by the drunkard’s wife! The sickness of hope deferred and crushed—the destruction of all happiness here, or hope of it hereafter! It was what his own eyes had seen, his own acts had caused—and it was the eloquence of simple truth. More than one thought of poor Mrs. Hall, I am sure. As for myself, I know not when I have been so excited, and after the exhausted speaker had concluded his thrilling appeal, and the whole rude assembly joined in a song arranged to the plaintive air of Auld Lang Syne—more like a triumphal chant it seemed, as it surged through the room—I forgot all rules of form, and though I had sung nothing but tame Italian _cavatinas_ for years, my voice rose with the rest, forgetful of all but the scene around me.