"It has been that already."
The enraged husband cast at her the look of a fiend, and passed on to the adjoining room, which was calculated to be an elegant parlor when the house was raised, but which was now converted into a store room, for old barrels, old baskets, old hats and bonnets, and, in fine, a great variety of old things. In one corner stood a little old bedstead, with an old flock bed, covered with patched sheets and a ragged quilt, where James slept. The loom was in that room and the spinning wheels; an old churn and many other things, too numerous to mention.
Mr. Benson reached up his hand, to take down a large bunch of woolen yarn that hung suspended on a nail. His wife sprang forward, saying, "Do not touch that--it is not mine."
"I don't care whose it is. I must and will have something that will sell."
At that moment, seeing the package of dried apple, he pounced upon it, like a tiger upon its prey, and bore it rapidly away, with the remonstrances of a weeping wife ringing in his ears.
And the traffickers in human souls bought it at a price, paid him in liquid fire, and he returned to his home, more fiend than when he left it. The wife's dress was gone; the comfortable things she hoped to procure for the children were gone. She sat up and toiled late at night--and all for what? To procure that poison for her husband that was contaminating his and her own soul, and cast such a blight upon her home. Was it not enough that their house and land were mortgaged, their horse and carriage gone? but must she toil with her own hands, to satisfy that appetite that cries, "give, give?" As these thoughts passed through Mrs. Benson's mind, she mentally exclaimed,
"O, it is a sad thing to be a drunkard's wife."
A few weeks after she went to an old chest that stood in one corner of the room, to get a piece of woolen goods she had carefully prepared for the market, which would bring her several dollars. She had placed an old band box, quill wheel and some other rubbish upon the chest, to conceal it from view as much as possible. Upon opening it, she discovered her treasure was gone, and she knew too well, for what purpose. The son, too, drank with his father, and got so much the start of him in brutality, that even he cowered before him, thus realizing that "He that soweth the wind shall reap the whirlwind." But those years passed on; the children grew up in their perverseness, a family that feared neither God or man.
No prayer ever ascended, like sweet incense, from those hearts; no hymns of praise fell from those lips; but they daily invoked curses upon each other--and who shall say that the curse causeless came?
The eldest daughter married a miserable drunkard, contrary to the wishes of her father, threatening to fire the house over their heads, if they opposed her in the least. The second daughter lived in disgrace, with a man equally miserable, till the house was demolished over their heads.