ling in the deluding sweets, and yet thousands more blindly
hovering over them, all unmindful of their danger, and apparently eager
to share the same destruction, how often has the spectacle of their
infatuation seemed to me, to be an exact picture of the woful delusion
of those who surrender themselves to the fatal influences of the
intoxicating cup. Even although they see the miserable victims of this
degrading vice, falling all around them, into premature and dishonored
graves, they still press on, madly trampling as it were, over their dead
and dying bodies, that they too may sink into the same abyss of agonies,
and that their sun may also go down in darkness and hopeless gloom. Even
although they know that the next cup may send them, with all their sins
upon their heads, to the dread tribunal of their God, that cup of bitter
sorrows and untold degradation, they will drain even to its most
loathsome dregs.

The avaricious bee that despised the slow process of extracting nectar
from "every opening flower," and plunged recklessly into the tempting
sweets, has ample time to bewail its folly. Even if it has not paid the
forfeit of its life, but has been able to obtain its fill, it returns
home with all its beautiful plumage sullied and besmeared, and with a
woe-begone look, and sorrowful note, in marked contrast with the bright
hues and merry sounds with which the industrious bee returns from its
happy rovings amid "the budding honey flowers, and sweetly breathing
fields."

Just so, has many a pilgrim from the golden shores of California and
Australia, returned; enfeebled in body and mind, bankrupt often in
character and happiness, if not in purse, and unfitted in every way, for
the calm and sober pursuits of common industry; while thousands, yes,
and tens of thousands too, shall never more behold their once happy
homes. Bibles and Sabbaths, altars and firesides, parents and friends,
wife and children, how often have all these been wantonly abandoned, in
the accursed greed for gain, by those who might have been happy and
prosperous at home, and who wandered from its sacred precincts only
because they were determined to make the possession of wealth, the chief
object of life, but whose bones now lie amid the coral reefs of the
ocean, or moulder in the howling wastes of the "overland passage;" just
as the bones of the unbelieving Israelites whitened the sands of the
desert. Of those who have reached the "land of" golden