Get on the Water Wagon - William Ashley Sunday

GET ON THE WATER WAGON. 11 and put his hand on him in gentleness and friendly kindness but in an insanity of drunken rage he raised the revolver and shot his friend dead in his blood upon the street. There was a trial; he was was found guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and when the little mother heard the verdict—a frail little bit of a woman—she threw up her hands and fell in a swoon. In three hours she was dead. “In the streets of Freeport, Ill., a young man of good family became involved in a controversy with a lewd woman of the town. He went in a drunken frenzy to his father’s home, armed himself with a deadly weapon and set forth in the city in search of the woman with whom he had quarreled. The first person he met upon the public square in the city, in the daylight, in a place where she had a right to be, was one of the most refined and cultured women of Freeport. She carried in her arms her babe, motherhood and babyhood, upon the streets of Freeport in the day time where they had a right to be, but this young man in his drunken insanity mistook her for the woman he sought and shot her dead upon the streets with her babe in her arms. He was tried and Judge Ferand, in sentencing him to life imprisonment, said: ‘You are the seventh man in two years to be sentenced for murder while intoxicated. “Last spring, in the city of Anderson, you remember the tragedy in the Blake home. A young man came home intoxicated, demanding money of his mother. She refused it. He seized from the wood box a hatchet and killed his mother, and then robbed her. You remember he fled. The officers of the law pursued him, brought him back. An indictment was read to him, charging him with the murder of the mother who had given him his birth, of her who had gone down into the valley of the shadow of death to give him life, of her who. had looked down into his blue eyes and thanked God for his' life. And he said, ‘I am guilty, I did it all.’ And Judge McClure sentenced him to life imprisonment. “Now I have followed probably three of the thirty-six' pints of the farmer’s product of a bushel of corn and the three of them have struck down seven lives, the three boys who

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