REFORM WITH MONEY IN IT. Tom Adams, driver of the brick-yard wagon, and signer of one of the pledges circulated at the great temperance meeting, was certainly a man worth saving. He had a wife and was rich in children. His wife was faithful, good-natured, and industrious, and his children were of that bright, irrepressible nature which is about the most valuable of inheritances in this land where other inheritances do not average largely in money value. For the good of such a group it was very desirable that the head of the family should be in the constant possession of strong arms and all his wits. And even for his own sake Tom was worth a great deal more attention than men of his kind ever receive. He was perfectly honest, a hard worker, cheerier in temperament than any pastor in the village, quicker-witted than most of the lawyers within the judicial circuit upon which the town of Barton was situated, and more generous in proportion to his means than any of his well-to-do fellow-citizens. During the season for making and delivering bricks he worked from sunrise to sunset, rendered fair count to seller and buyer, and never abused his employer’s horses. His regular pay was seventy-five cents per day, which sum, in a land where flour was sold at two cents per pound and meat was only twice as high as flour, and a comfortable house could be hired at four dollars per month, paid his family expenses. But the season at the brick-yard lasted only during six months of the twelve. During the remaining six months Tom gladly did any work he could find: he drove teams where any hauling was to be done, chopped wood, worked in the pork-houses where merchants prepared for the Southern market the fatted hogs which were the principal legal-tenders for the indebtedness of farmer customers, formed part of the crew of one of the many flatboats which conveyed the meat to market, and did whatever other work he could find. But in the winter season, when the family appetite was most industrious, Tom could not find employment for all his time, while the merchants who trusted him made more frequent requests for money than Tom was able to honor. When he was idle, he found himself more welcome at the liquor-shops than anywhere else; when he grew despondent at his inability to pay, he sought solace at these same places; when in the steady work and long hours of the summer season he became gradually “worked out” and “used up”--experiences not infrequent with Tom--he went to the liquor-shops for the only relief he had ever been able to find. His experience did not differ greatly from that of men of higher social standing, who, under similar mental and physical conditions, drink high-priced wines. He gradually increased the quantity of his potations, and went through the successive experiences of being unmanned by liquor, striving to rebuild himself by the power which had broken him, becoming by turns gay, silly, boisterous, pugnacious, sullen, apathetic, and finally