After he had become sober and rational once more, I happened to meet him
in the street, and asked him why he did not come to work as usual. With
a voice trembling and suppressed, and with a look of grief,
self-reproach, and despair that I shall never forget, he said, "I can
never come into your shop again. I have not only violated my contract
with you, but I have treated you with the basest ingratitude, proved
myself unworthy of your confidence, and destroyed the last hope of my
reformation."
I assured him of my increased desire for his welfare; he returned to his
employment, and his attention to business evinced the sincerity of his
confessions.
But not more than three months had elapsed before he was taken again in
the toils of his old deceiver; and at this time he was so furious and
unmanageable, that he was arrested and committed to the workhouse. He
was soon released, and engaged once more in my business. He continued
for about two months, when he fell again; and after a frenzy of a week,
came to me and begged me to take him to the workhouse, as the only means
by which he should get sober. He remained there a few days, and then
returned to his work.
Such was his history: a few months sober, industrious, and obliging in
my shop; kind, attentive, and affectionate in his family; then a week
furiously drunk, absent from my shop, violent and abusive in his family;
then at the workhouse; and then sober, and at home again.
He had already been excommunicated from the church for his intemperance,
had become a terror to his wife, who frequently sent for me to protect
her from his violence, and seemed to be utterly abandoned.
In the month of May, 1833, he was again missing; and no one, not even
his wife, knew what had become of him. But in the course of the summer
she received a letter from him, in which he said he had got employment,
and wished her, without informing me where he was, to come and live with
him. She accordingly removed to his new residence, and I heard nothing
from either of them.
About two years and a half after this, he came into my shop one day; but
how changed. Instead of the bloated, wild, and despairing countenance
that once marked him as a drunkard, he now wore an aspect of
cheerfulness and health, of manliness and self-respect. I approached,
took him by the hand, and said, "Well, ----, how do you do?" "_I am
well_," said he, shaking my hand most cordially. "Yes," said I, "well in
more respects than one." "_Yes, I am_," was his emphatic reply. "_It is
now more than two years since I have tasted a drop of any thing that can
intoxicate._" He began by abstaining from ardent spirits only; "But,"
said he, "I soon found that what you had so often told me was true; that
I could not reform but by abstaining from all that can intoxicate. I
have done so, and you see the result."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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