The advocates of moderate drinking of intoxicants are among the most persistent and audacious of advisers of their own various deleterious decoctions, but they constantly supply, involuntarily enough, the most appalling contradiction of their own commendations.
A gentleman riding on a car noticed on the advertising spaces, placarded in immense type, the words: “Pure Rye Whisky—Tones up the Body, Brightens the Intellect, Invigorates the Soul.” This kind of “puffing” advertisement is common enough and the gentleman might have paid very little attention to it but his eyes happened to drop to a seat underneath the advertisement on which was lounging a drunken man. The eyes of this wretched being were bleared, his face bloated, with the lines of dissipation deeply engraven in it, and his body slouched down in the collapsing style characteristic of the habitual inebriate. That drunken man was a lurid illustration of the absolute falsehood of the advertisement. He as a ruined victim constituted the true advertisement of the effects of alcoholic indulgence.
(952)
EVIDENCE, PROVIDENTIAL
In the year 1799, Lieutenant Michael Fitton, of H. M. S. Ferret, was cruising off Port Royal, when his crew caught a big shark. Inside it was found a bundle of ship’s papers belonging to an American brig, the Nancy. On his return to Port Royal, Lieutenant Fitton found that the Nancy had been brought in for carrying contraband of war. Her skipper produced other papers to the authorities, which apparently cleared the ship—false papers which had been prepared in the event of the vessel being stopt. Her true papers, which proved that the Nancy was deeply implicated in the contraband traffic, had been thrown overboard just before she was overhauled, and the shark had swallowed them. The case was tried in the court-house at Kingston, where, at the critical moment, Lieutenant Fitton appeared on the scene and produced his find, to the consternation of the other side. The Nancy was forthwith condemned as a lawful prize, and her skipper was fined and sent to jail.
The head of the shark is in London, at the United Service Institution. It was for some time set up on show at Port Royal, Jamaica, with this label attached: “Lieutenant Fitton recommends these jaws for a collar for neutrals to swear through.”
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EVIL, BEGINNINGS OF
A while ago the omnibus on its way from Gray’s Inn Road to Islington (England) had to traverse a narrow and dangerous piece of roadway—a sharp, slippery declivity called “The Devil’s Slide.” How terrible, indeed, is the devil’s slide! How tempting it is!—a short cut, a very short cut, to fame, wealth, power, pleasure. How graduated and smooth it is! What a specious name it often has! Strangely enough, that declivity in London was called “Mount Pleasant”; and the downward roads of life often are known by charming names. But enter on that slide, and you soon attain a startling velocity; sooner or later you arrive at an ignominious doom. Let no man think himself safe. The circles of crime dipping to very murky depths of hell are not far from any one of us. (Text.)—W. L. Watkinson, “The Transfigured Sackcloth.”
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