SELLING HIS DAUGHTER'S BODY FOR RUM.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3039, 23 March 1881, Page 3

SELLING HIS DAUGHTER'S BODY FOR RUM.

A highly respectable physician is authority for tho following story of almost unbelievable depravity:—An old man in this city depends for support upon the work of his daughter—his only child. He was not worthy ef that support, and lie was a slave to that most hideous of harsh masters the whisky-bottle. He made no efforts to earn an honest living for himself, although able of limb and sound of mind, but was an almost constant dweller at whisky-shops and loafing corners. His daughter went out to sew, and her father compelled her, every day, to give him a quarter to buy liquor. With that money he always went out evenings to blow his coin, his health, and brains into whisky jugs, leaving his child, tired and tearful, in a frequently cold and dark house. By her toil she secured a sewing machine, and did her sewing at home. She did everything in her power to draw her father out from tho folds of the monster that with a thousand arms was dragging him down. The neighbors reasoned with him and scolded him, but with no avail. He regularly slept in a gutter or crawled home from some saloon in the morning, to bear to hi 3 poor girl tho sight of "the old man drunk again." One day, when all the streets of Cleveland wore covered with ice, the daughter slipped and fell near the public square. She was picked tip badly injured, and carried to one of the hospitals. Her fall, was too much for her frail system, weakened and run down by unceasing toil, poor food, cheerless days and nights of sorrow. For several days she tossed in fever, and, although kindly cared

for, she finally died. The father missed i her daily pittance for his rum, and pawned l her sewing-machine to buy more liquor. The poor dead girl was buried quietly, no one going to thu pauper's graveyard except the undertakers and the father. _ Tho ladies who lived neighbors to the girl made a beautiful wreath to be put on the coffin, and gave it to tho father to be placed there in the grave. The wreath he sold for liquor. At night,,when the rum cravings came on strongest, the old man secured a horse and waggon, drove to the grave where his dead daughter was buried, dug up the earth, tore the emaciated body from its resting place, and conveyed it away to the storage-room of a medical" college. He sold it there for a miserable pittance—a few dollars—with which ho again went to kneel down before the frightful idol to whom he had offered up health, happiness, home, his only child, and his own soul. Humanity so sunk is happily seldom seen. With the price of his faithful daughter's body, that man, the physician says, is even now debauching himself. —Cleveland Leader.