Little Bobtail by Oliver Optic — Read

"What have you done with it, Robert? " demanded Ezekiel Taylor, a coarse, rough man of forty, who was partially intoxicated and very angry. "You and your mother've hid that jug of rum."

Robert looked at Mrs. Taylor, who was making bread at the table, but he did not deem it prudent to make any reply. That jug was the evil genius of the little household. It had transformed Ezekiel Taylor from an honest, industrious, and thriving man, into a mean, lazy, and thriftless drunkard. It had brought misery and contention into the little house which he had bought and paid for before his marriage. He was a cooper by trade, and had set up in business for himself; but his dissolute habit had robbed him of his shop, and reduced him first to a journeyman and then to a vagabond. He earned hardly enough to pay for the liquor he consumed; but, somehow, -- and how was the mystery which perplexed everybody who knew the Taylors, -- the family always had enough to eat and good clothes to wear. Years before, he had, under the pretence of buying a shop in which to set up in business again, mortgaged his house for five hundred dollars, and his wife had signed away her right of dower in the premises, without a suspicion of anything wrong. But the money was quickly squandered, and Squire Gilfilian, who had the mortgage, threatened to take the place, though the interest was paid with tolerable regularity by the wife.