Gross Alexander

Steve P. Holcombe, the Converted Gambler - The Original Classic Edition

Gross Alexander

This is a high quality book of the original classic edition. <p> This is a freshly published edition of this culturally important work, which is now, at last, again available to you. <p> Enjoy this classic work. These few paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside: <p>
His son says of him: My poor father had gotten to be a confirmed drunkard before I was born, and after he had settled at Shippingsport, my mother would not let him stay about the house, so that most of his time was spent in lying around bar-rooms or out on the commons, where he usually slept all times of the year.
<p>…Once a stranger stopped for a few days at the tavern in Shippingsport, and the roughs of the place caught him out on one occasion and beat him so severely that he was left for dead; but he crawled afterward into an old shed where little Holcombe, between five and six years old, found him and took him food every day for about two weeks.[
<p>…Nor did he foresee that he was forming an attachment then and there for one who was to love him devotedly and serve him patiently through all phases of infidelity and wickedness, and through years of almost unexampled trials and sufferings, who was to cling to him amid numberless perils and scandals, who was to train and restrain his children so as to lead them in ways of purity and goodness in spite of the fathers bad example, who was to endure for his sake forms of ill treatment that have killed many a woman, and who was in long distant years to be his most patient encourager and helper in a singularly blessed and successful work for God and the most abandoned and hopeless class of sinful men, and to develop, amid all and in spite of all and by means of all, one of the truest and strongest and most devoted of female characters.
<p>…Having returned to the landing one night about midnight they found a fierce-looking man sitting on the wharf-boat who said to them on entering, I understand there are some gamblers here and I have come to play them, and I can whip any two men on the Ohio river, at the same time exposing a large knife which he carried in his boot.
<p>…It was a great trial for his young wife to be taken from among her relatives and friends and put down among people who were entire strangers, especially that she had found out in four or five years of married life that her husband had grown away from her, that his heart and life were in other people than his family, in other places than his home and in others pleasures than his duty.