George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

( From the Salem Landmark. )

"INQUIRE AT AMOS GILES' DISTILLERY."

Some time ago the writer's notice was arrested by an advertisement in one of the newspapers, which closed with words similar to the following: "Inquire At Amos Giles' Distillery." The reader may suppose, if he choose, that the following story was a dream, suggested by that phrase.

Deacon Giles was a man who loved money, and was never troubled with tenderness of conscience. His father and his grandfather before him had been distillers, and the same occupation had come to him as an heir-loom in the family. The still-house was black with age, as well as with the smoke of furnaces that never went out, and the fumes of tortured ingredients, ceaselessly converted into alcohol. It looked like one of Vulcan's Stithies, translated from the infernal regions into this world. Its stench filled the atmosphere, and it seemed as if drops of poisonous alcoholic perspiration might be made to ooze out from any one of its timbers or clapboards on a slight pressure. Its owner was a treasurer to a Bible Society; and he had a little counting-room in one corner of the distillery where he sold Bibles.

He that is greedy of gain troubleth his own house. Any one of those Bibles would have told him this, but he chose to learn it from experience. It was said that the Worm of the Still lay coiled in the bosom of his family, and certain it is that one of its members had drowned himself in the vat of hot liquor, in the bottom of which a skeleton was some time after found, with heavy weights tied to the ancle bones. Moreover, Deacon Giles' temper was none of the sweetest, naturally; and the liquor he drank, and the fires and spiritous fumes among which he lived, did nothing to soften it. If his workmen sometimes fell into his vats, he himself oftener fell out with his workmen. This was not to be wondered at, considering the nature of their wages which, according to no unfrequent stipulation, would be as much raw rum as they could drink.