The Monroe Journal

HELPED SAM GET TO HEAVEN
A Union County Man Whose Flesh Always Crawled at Sight of a Peach Tree or a Deck of Cards.

To the Editor Journal:

After a long drought we are having refreshing showers. They not only revive vegetation, but manhood as well. During a drought every thinking man tightens his grip on his purse. After the long drought of 1845 my grandfather sent his horses to east Tennessee to winter, but now if one section of this great Union fails to make a crop, the mighty moguls that plough through the bowels of the earth from Maine to California, bring bread, the staff of life, to every man's door.

Our legislature, back in the 50's, passed a law against dueling in North Carolina, to stop the flow of blood in time of peace, but it does not seem to have much effect these days. The smoke of Ernest Haywood's revolver had hardly blown away from killing poor Ludlow Skinner, before another man is shot down in the city of Raleigh. Not many months ago a kind mother in Pineville asked the mayor of that town to adopt the curfew law, to drive the boys home at 9 o'clock. I think the mothers of Raleigh had better get their mayor to ring the curfew bell at sunset, to keep their girls at home.

Israel Helms, Mike Osborne and Archie McLarty asked for no curfew bell to raise their families by. They used the prescription laid down in holy writ: "Spare the rod and spoil the child." I was once at Howard's Mill. Little Sam Howard of Vance township (now deceased) was the miller. A young man stepped in and asked me to play a game of cards. I asked to be excused, for I did not know one card from another. He then asked Sam. He shook his head and said it made his flesh crawl to see a deck of cards. He said one of his school mates came home with him once, and after supper they retired to the cook house, and in there his friend was giving him his first lesson in card playing. Some one knocked at the door. He opened it, and who should come in but his mother. She took him by the hand, led him around the house, jerked down a peach tree limb—and ever after a deck of cards and a peach tree limb flew to his brain at once. No doubt that good old mother helped Sam get to heaven.

History tells us that the father of Martin Luther was accustomed to inflict on him cruel chastisement and his mother whip him until the blood came for a mere trifle. Such was the general system of family government in those days. There is no man recorded in the pages of history who did more for the reformation of the church of Christ than Martin Luther. Not many years ago a prominent clergyman visited the North Carolina penitentiary and asked an old convict what was the first step of his downfall. He said, "Breaking the Sabbath day." You find a man today who keeps the Sabbath holy in his family, and you seldom see his children in stripes or behind prison bars.

There is to be three weeks' term of court in our county. There is not a case, civil or criminal, from Sandy Ridge township that I am aware of. If our justices of peace will always do their duty the criminal docket will not be crowded.

WOLFSVILLE CROSS ROADS.