swear uproariously, and break up the play to fight with knife or pistol—first scraping the table of every penny. When the passengers are asleep, he surveys the luggage, to see what may be worth stealing; he pulls a watch from under the pillow of one sleeper; fumbles in the pockets of another; and gathers booty throughout the cabin. Leaving the boat before morning, he appears at some village hotel, a magnificent gentleman, a polished traveller, or even a distinguished nobleman!

There is another gambler, cowardly, sleek, stealthy, humble, mousing, and mean—a simple blood-sucker. For money, he will be a tool to other gamblers; steal for them, and from them; he plays the jackal, and searches victims for them, humbly satisfied to pick the bones afterward. Thus, (to employ his own language,) he ropes in the inexperienced young, flatters them, teaches them, inflames their passions, purveys to their appetites, cheats them, debauches them, draws them down to his own level, and then lords it over them in malignant meanness. Himself impure, he plunges others into lasciviousness; and with a train of reeking satellites, he revolves a few years in the orbit of the game, the brothel, and the doctor's shop; then sinks and dies: the world is purer, and good men thank God that he is gone.

Besides these, time would fail me to describe the ineffable dignity of a gambling judge; the cautious, phlegmatic lawyer, gambling from sheer avarice; the broken-down and cast-away politician, seeking in the game the needed excitement, and a fair field for all the base tricks he once played off as a patriot; the pert, sharp, keen, jockey-gambler; the soaked, obese, plethoric, wheezing, bacchanal; and a crowd of ignoble worthies, wearing all the badges and titles of vice, throughout its base peerage.

A detail of the evils of gambling should be preceded by an illustration of that constitution of mind out of which they mainly spring—I mean its EXCITABILITY. The body is not stored with a fixed amount of strength, nor the mind with a uniform measure of excitement; but both are capable, by stimulation, of expansion of strength or feeling, almost without limit. Experience shows, that within certain bounds, excitement is healthful and necessary, but beyond this limit, exhausting and destructive. Men are allowed to choose between moderate but long-continued excitement, and intense but short-lived excitement. Too generally they prefer the latter. To gain this intense thrill, a thousand methods are tried. The inebriate obtains it by drink and drugs; the politician, by the keen interest of the civil campaign; the young by amusements which violently inflame and gratify their appetites. When once this higher flavor of stimulus has been tasted, all that is less becomes vapid and disgustful. A sailor tries to live on shore; a few weeks suffice. To be sure, there is no hardship, or cold, or suffering; but neither is there the strong excitement of the ocean, the gale, the storm, and the world of strange sights. The politician perceives that his private affairs are deranged, his family neglected, his character aspersed, his feelings exacerbated. When men hear him confess that his career is a hideous waking dream, the race vexatious, and the end vanity, they wonder that he clings to it; but he knows that nothing but the fiery wine which he has tasted will rouse up that intense excitement, now become necessary to his happiness. For this reason, great men often cling to public office with all its envy, jealousy, care, toil, hates, competitions, and unrequited fidelity; for these very disgusts, and the perpetual struggle, strike a deeper chord of excitement than is possible to the gentler touches of home, friendship and love. Here too is the key to the real evil of promiscuous novel-reading, to the habit of reverie and mental romancing. None of life's common duties can excite to such wild pleasure as these; and they must be continued, or the mind reacts into the lethargy of fatigue and ennui. It is upon this principle that men love pain; suffering is painful to a spectator; but in tragedies, at public executions, at pugilistic combats, at cock-fightings, horse-races, bear-baitings, bull-fights, gladiatorial shows, it excites a jaded mind as nothing else can. A tyrant torments for the same reason that a girl reads her tear-bedewed romance, or an inebriate drinks his dram. No longer susceptible even to inordinate stimuli, actual moans, and shrieks, and the writhing of utter agony, just suffice to excite his worn-out sense, and inspire, probably, less emotion than ordinary men have in listening to a tragedy or reading a bloody novel.

Gambling is founded upon the very worst perversion of this powerful element of our nature. It heats every part of the mind like an oven. The faculties which produce calculation, pride of skill, of superiority, love of gain, hope, fear, jealousy, hatred, are absorbed in the game, and exhilarated, or exacerbated by victory or defeat. These passions are, doubtless, excited in men by the daily occurrences of life; but then they are transient, and counteracted by a thousand grades of emotion, which rise and fall like the undulations of the sea. But in gambling there is no intermission, no counteraction. The whole mind is excited to the utmost, and concentrated at its extreme point of excitation for hours and days, with the additional waste of sleepless nights, profuse drinking, and other congenial immoralities. Every other pursuit becomes tasteless; for no ordinary duty has in it a stimulus which can scorch a mind which now refuses to burn without blazing, or to feel an interest which is not intoxication. The victim of excitement is like a mariner who ventures into the edge of a whirlpool for a motion more exhilarating than plain sailing. He is unalarmed during the first few gyrations, for escape is easy. But each turn sweeps him further in; the power augments, the speed becomes terrific as he rushes toward the vortex; all escape now hopeless. A noble ship went in; it is spit out in broken fragments, splintered spars, crushed masts, and cast up for many a rood along the shore. The specific evils of gambling may now be almost imagined.

I. It diseases the mind, unfitting it for the duties of life. Gamblers are seldom industrious men in any useful vocation. A gambling mechanic finds his labor less relishful as his passion for play increases. He grows unsteady, neglects his work, becomes unfaithful to promises; what he performs he slights. Little jobs seem little enough; he desires immense contracts, whose uncertainty has much the excitement of gambling—and for the best of reasons; and in the pursuit of great and sudden profits, by wild schemes, he stumbles over into ruin, leaving all who employed or trusted him in the rubbish of his speculations.

A gambling lawyer, neglecting the drudgery of his profession, will court its exciting duties. To explore authorities, compare reasons, digest, and write,—this is tiresome. But to advocate, to engage in fiery contests with keen opponents, this is nearly as good as gambling. Many a ruined client has cursed the law, and cursed a stupid jury, and cursed everybody for his irretrievable loss, except his lawyer, who gambled all night when he should have prepared the case, and came half asleep and debauched into court in the morning to lose a good case mismanaged, and snatched from his gambling hands by the art of sober opponents.

A gambling student, if such a thing can be, withdraws from thoughtful authors to the brilliant and spicy; from the pure among these, to the sharp and ribald; from all reading about depraved life, to seeing; from sight to experience.