sands and thousands--set up shout
after shout that you could have heard almost on the Green Mountains.

Another horse came out first best on the second round, but a couple of
men, right behind me, insisted that Blind Tom ought to have the
money--what money I didn't understand--but I agreed with the men, if
there was anything that a horse could accept, Blind Tom was the animal
for the money.

Sisters, there don't seem much that is wrong about this. You can't see
any amount of deep iniquity in it, can you now? I didn't discover
anything poisonous to the moral character; but then we female women
don't always see deep enough into great social and religious questions,
and horse-racing is one.

What do you think the gloves and neckties meant? What hidden sin lay
buried under the pools? What, after all, took that great multitude up to
that beautiful hollow among the hills? Gambling, my dear; male and
female gambling, nothing more, nothing less. The horses run for money.
The jockeys ride for money. The men bet money, hats, gloves, hundreds,
thousands, on this horse and that. Everybody gambles, and everybody
likes it.

Sisters, that poor man's hat was a pool; there wasn't a drop of water in
it; still it was a pool. The two five-cent pieces I threw into it were a
dead loss to charity. The scraps of crumpled paper meant dollars. The
heap of bills that I tucked away in my pocket-book, innocent as twenty
lambs, was money that I had won gambling, ignorantly, innocently.

With Christianity at my heart, and gambling money in my pocket, I feel
demoralized as a church member; yet I must confess it exhilated me as if
I had been on the top of a high mountain, and was looking down with
delicious dizziness. I a gambler, I a diver into pools no larger than a
man's hat, but dangerous as the bottomless pit! I cannot realize it; and
when realized, it seems to me as if I couldn't be properly penitent.
That sort of thing doesn't seem so awful to me as it did before I got
into it, in this pleasant, innocent, and sweetly promiscuous manner.

Is this "rolling sin like a sweet morsel under the tongue"? Am I getting
faithless to the trust with which I set forth on this city mission?

This much I will say in my own behalf: horse-racing, if pernicious, is
awfully pleasant, and horse-betting (gloves and neckties I mean)
is--well--ditto.

_Such_ a ride home as we had! Trees and grass, cool and green--no dust.
The sun going down, and throwing red s