He entered unannounced. It was as he suspected. The doctor was lounging in his easy chair before the fire, indulging in a hearty fit of laughter over some paragraph in a newspaper, which he held in his hand.
"Ah, my dear J---, I am so glad to find you so well. I thought by your sending for the brandy, that you were dying with the toothache."
The doctor, rather confounded--"Why, yes; I have been sadly troubled with it of late. It does not come on, however, before eight o'clock, and if I cannot get a mouthful of brandy, I never can get a wink of sleep all night."
"Did you ever have it before you took the pledge?"
"Never," said the doctor emphatically.
"Perhaps the cold water does not agree with you?"
The doctor began to smell a rat, and fell vigorously to minding the fire.
"I tell you what it is, J---," said the other; "the toothache is a nervous affection. It is the brandy that is the disease. It may cure you of an imaginary toothache; but I assure you, that it gives your wife and daughter an incurable heartache."
The doctor felt at that moment a strange palpitation at his own. The scales fell suddenly from his eyes, and for the first time his conduct appeared in its true light. Returning the bottle to his friend, he said, very humbly--"Take it out of my sight; I feel my error now. I will cure their heartache by curing myself of this beastly vice."
The doctor, from that hour, became a temperate man. He soon regained his failing practice, and the esteem of his friends. The appeal of his better feelings effected a permanent change in his habits, which signing the pledge had not been able to do. To keep up an appearance of consistency he had had recourse to a mean subterfuge, while touching his heart produced a lasting reform.