The habit had proved too strong for his weak will. He had resumed drinking. No one knew it but his wife and one confidential friend. He rarely took much; never so much as to be brutal at home, or unfit for business at the office; but enough to prove to him that he was not his own master. The shame of his bondage he felt keenly, powerless as he felt himself to break the chains. The week after I left home his wife left also for a visit to her father's. She took the children, one a young babe three months old, with her. Mr. P. was to follow her in a fortnight. She never saw him again. One night he went to his solitary home. Possibly he had been drinking-no one ever knew-opened his photograph album, covered his own photograph with a piece of an old envelope, that it might no longer look upon the picture of his wife on the opposite page, and wrote her, on a scrap of paper torn from a letter, this line of farewell: "I have fought the battle as long as I can. It is no use. I will not suffer my wife and children to share with me a drunkard's shame. God-bye. God have mercy on you and me." The next morning, long after the streets had resumed their accustomed activity, and other houses threw wide open their shutters to admit the fragrance of flowers, and the song of birds, and the glad sunshine, and all the joy of life, that house was shut and still. When the office clerk, missing him, came to seek him, the door was fast. Neighbors were called in. A window was forced open. Lying upon the bed, where he had fallen the night before, lay poor Charlie P. A few drops of blood stained the white coverlet. It oozed from a bullet wound in the back of his head. The hand in death still grasped the pistol that fired the fatal shot. CHAPTER XXVIII. Our Village Library. TO that prayer-meeting and Father Hyatt's story of Charlie P., Wheathedge owes its library. "Mr. Laicus," said Mr. Gear as we came out of the meeting together, "I hope this temperance movement isn't going to end in a prayer-meeting. The praying is all very well, but I want to see some work go along with it." "Very well," said I, "what do you propose?" "I don't know," said he. "But I think we might do something. I believe in the old proverb. The gods help those who help themselves."