A young man, having suddenly heired a large property, sits at the
hazard-table, and takes up in a dice-box the estate won by a father's
lifetime sweat, and shakes it, and tosses it away.
Intemperance soon stigmatizes its victim--kicking him out, a slavering
fool, into the ditch, or sending him, with the drunkard's hiccough,
staggering up the street where his family lives. But gambling does
not, in that way, expose its victims. The gambler may be eaten up by
the gambler's passion, yet only discover it by the greed in his eyes,
the hardness of his features, the nervous restlessness, the threadbare
coat, and his embarrassed business. Yet he is on the road to hell,
and no preacher's voice, or startling warning, or wife's entreaty, can
make him stay for a moment his headlong career. The infernal spell
is on him; a giant is aroused within; and though you bind him with
cables, they would part like thread; and though you fasten him seven
times round with chains, they would snap like rusted wire; and though
you piled up in his path, heaven-high, Bibles, tracts and sermons, and
on the top should set the cross of the Son of God, over them all the
gambler would leap like a roe over the rocks, on his way to perdition.
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