The Good Time Coming

„There was not a cloud in all the bright blue sky, nor a shadow upon the landscape that lay in beauty around the lovely home of Edward Markland; a home where Love had folded her wings, and Peace sought a perpetual abidingplace. The evening of a mild summer day came slowly on, with its soft, cool airs, that just dimpled the shining river, fluttered the elm and maple leaves, and gently swayed the aspiring heads of the old poplars, which, though failing at the root, still lifted, like virtuous manhood, their greenest branches to heaven.'   Timothy Shay Arthur (June 6, 1809 - March 6, 1885) - known as T. S. Arthur - was a popular 19th-century American author. He is famously known for his temperance novel Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There (1854), which helped demonize alcohol in the eyes of the American public. His stories, written with compassion and sensitivity, articulated and spread values and ideas that were associated with 'respectable middle class' life in America. He also believed greatly in the transformative and restorative power of love as is shown in one of his stories, 'An Angel in Disguise'. He was also the author of dozens of stories for Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most popular American monthly magazine in the antebellum era, and he published and edited his own Arthur’s Home Magazine, a periodical in the Godey’s model, for many years.