n Wild, of
pilfering propensities, and a professional gambler, says: "Such was the
power of habit over the minds of these illustrious persons, that Mr.
Wild could not keep his hands out of the count's pockets, though he
knew they were empty; nor could the count abstain from palming a card,
though he was well aware Mr. Wild had no money to pay him."

"Habit," says Montaigne, "is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress.
She, by little and little, slyly and unperceived, slips in the foot of
her authority, but having by this gentle and humble beginning, with the
aid of time, fixed and established it, she then unmasks a furious and
tyrannic countenance against which we have no more the courage nor the
power so much as to lift up our eyes." It led a New York man actually
to cut off his hand with a cleaver under a test of what he would resort
to, to get a glass of whiskey. It has led thousands of nature's
noblemen to drunkards' and libertines' graves.

Gough's life is a startling illustration of the power of habit, and of
the ability of one apparently a hopeless slave to break his fetters and
walk a free man in the sunlight of heaven. He came to America when
nine years old. Possessed of great powers of song, of mimicry, and of
acting, and exceedingly social in his tastes, a thousand temptations

"Widened and strewed with flowers the way
Down to eternal ruin."

"I would give this right hand to redeem those terrible seven years of
dissipation and death," he would often say in after years when, with
his soul still scarred and battered from his conflict with blighting
passion, he tearfully urged young men to free themselves from the
chains of bestial habits.

In the laboratory of Faraday a workman one day knocked into a jar of
acid a silver cup; it disappeared, was eaten up by the acid, and could
not be found. The question came up whether it could ever be found.
The great chemist came in and put certain chemicals into the jar, and
every particle of the silver was precipitated to the bottom. The mass
was then sent to a silversmith, and the cup restored. So a precious
youth who has fallen into the sink of iniquity, lost, dissolved in sin,
can only be restored by the Great Chemist.

What is put into the first of life is put into the whole of life. "Out
of a church of twenty-seven hundred members, I have never had to
exclude a single one who was received while a child," said Spurgeon.
It is the earliest sin