For this purpose, he supplied himself _immediately_ with a number of Tracts on temperance; for Jamie knew that when self-interest or passion come in, second thoughts are not always best; and forthwith he commenced travelling around, reading them, at spare hours throughout the neighborhood, wherever he could find half-a-dozen people to listen to him. He was a good reader, and very soon found that his reading was not without effect; for in a short time he heard of a decent woman telling her neighbor to send for Jamie to the wake which was to be held in her house, if she wished to save her whiskey, and have peace and quietness; for, said she, he came to the wake in my house, and read and talked about temperance, till both the whiskey and the people seemed either persuaded or frightened, for hardly one had the courage to put to his lips what Jamie called, indeed too truly, "the accursed thing." Jamie, however, soon found to his cost that he had commenced a very great and a very sore work. The spirit-sellers, four of whom were at a single cross-roads in his neighborhood, he expected to be against him, and drunkards he expected would be against him too; but he soon found that his chief opponents lay in quite another quarter. Sensible people soon began to see that spirit-sellers are drones on the community, doing no good, but much harm: and, besides, one of them having first allowed a temperance meeting to be held in his barn, conscientiously shut up his spirit-shop, and joined the Temperance Society, being convinced that spirit-selling is poison-selling, and that each spirit-shop might justly have on its sign-board, "Beggars made here." Of the drunkards, some indeed did call him hard names, and impute to him base motives; but from among even these, lost as they seemed to be to all hope, he was, by God's grace, enabled to reclaim some, as brands snatched from the burning, while others of them said to him, in the bitterness of their reflecting moments, Go on, Jamie, your work is God's work. Had you commenced but a little sooner, what a blessing might your Society have been to us; but alas, it is all over with us now! What at first surprised Jamie much was, that the fathers or husbands of these very drunkards were his most bitter opponents. He went to them with a glad heart, expecting that they would hear with delight of a plan by which drunkards, in great numbers, have been reclaimed, and by which the temperate can be effectually secured against temptation; but his heart sunk when he found, not that they received him coldly, for to such receptions he was accustomed, but that they, as well as others who boast much of being "temperate enough already," lost all temper at the very sound of temperance.