"What are you doing there?" inquired the boy.

"I'm taking comfort," he muttered, with his mouth in the dirt.

Taking his comfort! There he lay,--squalid and loathsome under the
bright heaven,--an imbruted man. The holy harmonies of Nature, the
sounds of gushing waters, the rustle of the leaves above him, the wild
flowers, the frost-bloom of the woods,--what were they to him?
Insensible, deaf, and blind, in the stupor of a living death, he lay
there, literally realizing that most bitterly significant Eastern
malediction, "May you eat dirt!"

In contrasting the exceeding beauty and harmony of inanimate Nature with
the human degradation and deformity before me, I felt, as I confess I
had never done before, the truth of a remark of a rare thinker, that
"Nature is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because, it has
no citizen. The beauty of Nature must ever be universal and mocking
until the landscape has human figures as good as itself. Man is fallen;
Nature is erect."--[Emerson.] As I turned once more to the calm blue
sky, the hazy autumnal hills, and the slumberous water, dream-tinted by
the foliage of its shores, it seemed as if a shadow of shame and sorrow
fell over the pleasant picture; and even the west wind which stirred the
tree-tops above me had a mournful murmur, as if Nature felt the
desecration of her sanctities and the discord of sin and folly which
marred her sweet harmonies.

God bless the temperance movement! And He will bless it; for it is His
work. It is one of the great miracles of our times. Not Father Mathew
in Ireland, nor Hawkins and his little band in Baltimore, but He whose
care is over all the works of His hand, and who in His divine love and