And when one night we picked him up
out of the Union Ditch, a begrimed and weather-worn drunkard, a
hopeless debtor, a self-confessed spendthrift, and a half-
conscious, maudlin imbecile, we knew that the end had come. The
wife he had abandoned had in turn deserted him; the woman he had
misled had already realized her folly, and left him with her
reproaches; the associates of his reckless life, who had used and
abused him, had found him no longer of service, or even amusement,
and clearly there was nothing left to do but to hand him over to
the state, and we took him to the nearest penitential asylum.
Conscious of the Samaritan deed, we went back to our respective
wives, and told his story. It is only just to say that these
sympathetic creatures were more interested in the philanthropy of
their respective husbands than in its miserable object. "It was
good and kind in you, dear," said loving Mrs. Maston to her spouse,
as returning home that night he flung his coat on a chair with an
air of fatigued righteousness; "it was like your kind heart to care
for that beast; but after he left that good wife of his--that
perfect saint--to take up with that awful woman, I think I'd have
left him to die in the ditch.
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