The Wanderer's Return

A THANKSGIVING STORY.

A MAN, who at first sight, a casual observer would have thought at least forty or fifty years of age, came creeping out of an old, miserable-looking tenement in the lower part of Cincinnati, a little while after night-fall, and, with bent body and shuffling gait, crossed the street an angle; and, after pausing for a few moments before a mean frame building, in the windows of which decanters of liquor were temptingly displayed, pushed open the door and entered.

It was early in November. Already the leaves had fallen, and there was, in the aspect of nature, a desolateness that mirrored itself in the feelings. Night had come, hiding all this, yet by no means obliterating the impression which had been made, but measurably increasing it; for, with the darkness had begun to fall a misty rain, and the rising wind moaned sadly among the eaves.

A short time after sundown the man, to whom we have just referred, came home to the comfortless-looking house we have seen him leaving. All day he had turned a wheel in a small manufactory; and when his work was done, he left, what to him was a prison-house, and retired to the cheap but wretched boarding-place he had chosen, where were congregated about a dozen men of the lowest class. He did not feel happy. That was impossible. No one who debases himself by intemperance can be happy; and this man had gone down, step by step, until he attained a depth of degradation most sad to contemplate. And yet he was not thirty years old! After supper he went out, as usual, to spend the evening in drinking.

The man, fallen as he was, and lost to all the higher and nobler sentiments of the heart, had experienced during the day a pressure upon his feelings heavier than usual, that had its origin in some reviving memories of earlier times.

The sound of his mother's voice had been in his ears frequently through the day; and images of persons, places, and scenes, the remembrance of which brought no joy to his heart, had many times come up before him. At the supper-table, amid his coarse, vulgar-minded companions, his laugh was not heard as usual; and, when spoken to, he answered briefly and in monosyllables.

The tippling-house to which the man went to spend his day's earnings and debase himself with drink, was one of the lowest haunts of vice in the city. Gambling with cards, dominoes, and dice, occupied the time of the greater number who made it a place of resort, and little was heard there except language the most obscene and profane. For his daily task at the wheel, the man was paid seventy-five cents a day. His boarding and lodging cost him thirty-one and a quarter cents,--and this had to be paid every night under penalty of being expelled from the house. He was a degraded drunkard, and not therefore worthy of confidence nor credit beyond a single day, and he received none. What remained of the pittance earned, was invariably spent in