Already it is Christmas morning. Unto whom have I silently to wish those good wishes which always lie nearest to one's heart? My own family, of course; papa and Lisa, and Penelope, far away. Poor dear Penelope! may she find herself a happy woman this time next year. Are these all? They were, last Christmas. But I am richer now. Richer, it often seems to me, than anybody in the whole world.
Good night! a merry—no—for “often in mirth the heart is sad”—a happy Christmas, and a good new year!
I
CHAPTER V. HIS STORY.
Dec. 31st, 1855.
T he merry-making of my neighbours in the flat above—probably Scotch or Irish, both of which greatly abound in this town—is a sad counteraction of work for to-night. But why grumble, when I am one of the few people who pretend to work at all on this holiday—a night which used to be such a treat to us boys. The sounds overhead put me in mind of that old festival of Hogmanay, which, for a good many things, would be “more honoured in the breach than the observance.”
This Liverpool is an awful town for drinking. Other towns may be as bad; statistics prove it; but I know no place where intoxication is so open and shameless. Not only in bye streets and foul courts, where one expects to see it, but everywhere. I never take a short railway journey in the after part of the day, but I am liable to meet at least one drunken “gentleman” snoozing in his first-class carriage; or, in the second class, two or three drunken “men,” singing, swearing, or pushed stupidly about by pale-faced wives. The sadness of the thing is, that the wives do not seem to mind it, that everybody takes it quite as a matter of course. The “gentleman,” often grey-haired, is but “merry,” as he is accustomed to be every night of his life; the poor man has only “had a drop or two,” as all his comrades are in the habit of taking, whenever they get the chance: they see no disgrace in it; so they laugh at him a bit, and humour him, and are quite ready to stand up for him against all in-comers who may object to such a fellow-passenger. They don't; nor do the women belonging to them, who are well-used to tolerate drunken sweethearts, and lead about and pacify drunken husbands. It makes me sick at heart sometimes to see a decent, pretty girl, sit tittering at a foul-mouthed beast opposite; or a tidy young mother with two or three bonnie children, trying to coax home, without harm to himself or them, some brutish husband, who does not know his right hand from his left, so utterly stupid is he with drink. To-night, but for my chance hand at a railway-station, such a family party as this might have reached home fatherless, and no great misfortune, one might suppose. Yet the wife had not even looked sad—had only scolded and laughed at him.
In this, as in most cases of reform, it is the women who must make the first step. There are two great sins of men: drunkenness in the lower classes; a still worse form of vice in the higher, which I believe women might help to stop, if they tried. Would to God I could cry to every young working woman, “Never encourage a drunken sweetheart!” and to every young lady thinking of marriage, “Beware! better die, than live to give children to a loose-principled, unchaste father.”