And so my aunt yielded the point; but from the day of her son’s desertion, there was in her a perceptible change. Far oftener was she found in the house of prayer, and less frequently was she seen in places of amusement, while more than once I heard her in secret asking that her wayward boy might be shielded from the great temptation. Alas! for thee, poor Herbert Langley, sleeping in thine early grave! There were prayers enough, methinks, to save thee; for at the old Meadow Brook home, thou wert remembered in the early morn, and not forgotten when at eve, my father knelt him down to pray. Why, then, didst thou fall ere thy sun had reached the meridian of manhood? Was it because in thine early training there was an error which no after exertions could repair? We answer, Yes. The fault was there, and little know they what they do, who set before their sons the poisonous cup, and bid them, by their own example, drink and die. How many young men, from the higher walks of life, now sleeping in the dishonored grave of a drunkard, might at this moment be filling some honorable position, had it not been for the wine or beer drinking habit acquired in childhood by their own firesides, and at their father’s table? Look to it, then, you around whose hearthstones promising sons are gathered, and if in the coming years you would escape the sleepless nights, the bitter tears, and the broken hearts of those whose children walk in the path, which, sooner than all others, leadeth down to death, teach them, both by precept and by practice, to “touch not, taste not, handle not,” for therein alone lieth safety. CHAPTER XIV. TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. Early in March, as I was one Saturday morning seated with my aunt in her pleasant, cozy sewing-room, a little boy brought me a note from Dell Clayton, in which she requested me, if possible, to spend the afternoon with her. She was sick, she wrote, unable to sit up, and what was worse than all, she was homesick and unhappy! Her aunt, she said, was out of the city, and as she had no acquaintance, she thought the sight of a familiar face would do her good.