"No use to try," he says. "Didn't I go a whole year and
never touch a drop? And now just because I fell once I'm kicked out! No
use to try. When a fellow once trips, everybody gives him a kick. Talk
about love of Christ! Who believes it? Don't see much love of Christ
where I go. Your Christians hit a fellow that's down as hard as anybody.
It's everybody for himself and devil take the hindmost. Well, I'll trudge
up to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and see if they'll take me on there--if they
won't I might as well go to sea, or to the devil," and out he flings.
"Mamma!" says a little voice, "what are we going to have for our
Christmas?"
It is a little girl, with soft curly hair and bright, earnest eyes, that
speaks.
A sturdy little fellow of four presses up to the mother's knee and
repeats the question, "Sha'n't we have a Christmas, mother?"
It overcomes the poor woman; she leans forward and breaks into sobbing,--
a tempest of sorrow, long suppressed, that shakes her weak frame as she
thinks that her husband is out of work, desperate, discouraged, and
tempted of the devil, that the rent is falling due, and only the poor pay
of her needle to meet it with. In one of those quick flashes which
concentrate through the imagination the sorrows of years, she seems to
see her little home broken up, her husband in the gutter, her children
turned into the street.
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