"Yes, yes!" I hear you cry—"it is a watchword—a glorious watchword, that bids us do or die—until the smoking hot, fiery furnace-like gates of hell, like this one now yawning before us, shall cease to be licensed by a Christian people, or send delicate little girls at midnight through the streets, crying 'Hot corn,' to support a drunken mother, whose first glass was taken in a 'fashionable saloon,' or first-class liquor-selling hotel."
"Hot corn," then, be the watchword of all who would rather see the grain fed to the drunkard's wife and children, than into the insatiable hot maw of the whiskey still.
Let your resolutions grow hot and strong, every time you hear this midnight city cry, that you will devote, if nothing more,
"Three grains of corn, mother,
Only three grains of corn,"
towards the salvation of the thousand equally pitiable objects as the little girl whose wailing cry has been the inciting cause of this present dish of "Hot Corn—smoking hot!"
CHAPTER III.
WILD MAGGIE.
"A woman sometimes scorns what best contents her."
It is human nature to scorn many things which would content us—which do content us after we once taste them.