ole tells of a gambler who fell at the table in a fit of apoplexy,
and his companions began to bet upon his chances of recovery. When the
physician came they refused to let him bleed the man because they said
it would affect the bet. When President Garfield was hanging between
life and death men bet heavily upon the issue, and even sold pools.

No disease causes greater horror or dread than cholera; yet when it is
once fastened upon a victim he is perfectly indifferent, and wonders at
the solicitude of his friends. His tears are dried; he cannot weep if
he would. His body is cold and clammy and feels like dead flesh, yet
he tells you he is warm, and calls for ice water. Have you never seen
similar insensibility to danger in those whose habits are already
dragging them to everlasting death?

Etherized by the fascinations of pleasure, we are often unconscious of
pain while the devil amputates the fingers, the feet and hands, or even
the arms and legs of our character. But oh, the anguish that visits
the sad heart when the lethe passes away, and the soul becomes
conscious of virtue sacrificed, of manhood lost.

The leper is often the last to suspect his danger, for the disease is
painless in its early stages. A leading lawyer and public official in
the Sandwich Islands once overturned a lighted lamp on his hand, and
was surprised to find that it caused no pain. At last it dawned upon
his mind that he was a leper. He resigned his offices and went to the
leper's island, where he died. So sin in its early stages is not only
painless but often even pleasant.

The hardening, deadening power of depraving habits and customs was
strikingly illustrated by the Romans.

Under Nero, the taste of the people had become so debauched and morbid
that no mere representation of tragedy would satisfy them. Their
cold-blooded selfishness, the hideous realism of "a refined, delicate,
aesthetic age," demanded that the heroes should actually be killed on
the stage. The debauched and sanguinary Romans reckoned life worthless
without the most thrilling experiences of horror or delight. Tragedy
must be genuine bloodshed, comedy, actual shame. When "The
Conflagration" was represented on the stage they demanded that a house
be actually burned and the furniture plundered. When "Laureolus" was
played they demanded that the actor be really crucified and mangled by
a bear, and he had to fling himself down and deluge the stage with his