BEAUTIFUL, AND AS TRUE AS BEAUTIFUL.

[Paul Denton, a celebrated itinerant Methodist preacher and missionary, in the early days of Texas, when the State, then a Mexican province, was the outlaw's home, collected a large crowd at a barbecue where he promised there should be plenty to drink of the best of liquors. Denton did this to collect a crowd that he might preach to them. After the barbecue was over, one of the boldest told Paul that he lied. "Where is your liquor?" said he. Drawing himself up to his full height, Paul thus broke forth in a strain that remains unsurpassed:]

"There—there is the liquor which God, the Eternal, brews for his children.

"Not in the simmering still, over smoking fires choked with poisonous gases, and surrounded with stench of sickening odors and rank corruption doth your Father in Heaven prepare that precious essence of life, pure cold water. Both in the green shade and grassy dell, where the red deer wanders and the child loves to play, there God brews it; and down, low down in the deepest valleys, where the fountains murmur and the rills sing; and high up on the mountain tops, where the naked granite glitters like gold in the sun; where hurricanes howl music; where big waves roar the chorus, sweeping the march of God—there, he brews it, that beverage of life, health-giving water.

"And everywhere it is a thing of beauty; gleaming in a dew-drop; singing in the summer rain, shining in the ice-gem, till the trees seem turning to living jewels, spreading a golden vail over the setting sun; or white gauze round the midnight moon; sporting in the glacier; dancing in the hail-shower; folding bright snowy curtains softly above the wintry world, and weaving the many-colored iris, that seraph's zone of the sky, whose warp is the rain of earth, whose woof is the sunbeam of heaven, all checkered o'er with celestial flowers by the mystic hand of refraction—still always beautiful; that blessed cold water. No poison bubbles on its brink; its foam brings not madness and murder; no blood stains its liquid glass; pale widows and starving orphans weep not burning tears in its clear depths; no drunkard's shrieking from the grave curses it in words of despair! Speak out, my friends, would you exchange it for the demon's drink, alcohol?"