ts down to his first game only for pastime and the desire of being
thought sociable. The players deal out the cards. They unconsciously
play into Satan's hands, who takes all the tricks, and both the
players' souls for trumps--he being a sharper at any game. A slight
stake is put up just to add interest to the play. Game after game is
played. Larger stakes and still larger. They begin to move nervously
on their chairs. Their brows lower and eyes flash, until now they who
win and they who lose, fired alike with passion, sit with set jaws,
and compressed lips, and clenched fists, and eyes like fire-balls
that seem starting from their sockets, to see the final turn before
it comes; if losing, pale with envy and tremulous with unuttered
oaths cast back red-hot upon the heart--or, winning, with hysteric
laugh--"Ha! Ha! I have it! I have it!"

A few years have passed, and he is only the wreck of a man. Seating
himself at the game ere he throws the first card, he stakes the last
relic of his wife, and the marriage-ring which sealed the solemn vows
between them. The game is lost, and, staggering back in exhaustion,
he dreams. The bright hours of the past mock his agony, and in his
dreams, fiends, with eyes of fire and tongues of flame, circle about
him with joined hands, to dance and sing their orgies with hellish
chorus, chanting--"Hail! brother!" kissing his clammy forehead until
their loathsome locks, flowing with serpents, crawl into his bosom
and sink their sharp fangs and suck up his life's blood, and coiling
around his heart pinch it with chills and shudders unutterable.

Take warning! You are no stronger than tens of thousands who have, by
this practice, been overthrown. No young man in our cities can escape
being tempted. _Beware of the first beginnings!_ This road is a
down-grade, and every instant increases the momentum. Launch not upon
this treacherous sea. Split hulks strew the beach. Everlasting storms
howl up and down, tossing the unwary crafts into the Hell-gate. I
speak of what I have seen with my own eyes. I have looked off into the
abyss and have seen the foaming, and the hissing, and the whirling
of the horrid deep in which the mangled victims writhed, one
upon another, and struggled, strangled, blasphemed, and died--the
death-stare of eternal despair upon their countenances as the waters
gurgled over them.

To a gambler's death-bed there comes no hope. He will probably die
alone. His former associates co