The _beginnings_ of vice are to be carefully watched. Bad habits are like the nets which the insidious spider weaves around her victims. If the first tender thread is allowed to entwine itself around you, the next will prove a snare not easily broken. Warn those over whom you have any influence, not against the festive glass, but the morning whet, and the evening dose, taken to recruit exhausted nature. The strength they give is momentary, and they finally debilitate instead of invigorating the constitution. They are the first fine chords Satan weaves round those he is sure to destroy. You may think you have sense and firmness enough to command your appetite, but where one escapes, thousands fall. Tis like the famous Upas of Java, where criminals who have forfeited their lives are sent to procure poison, if they succeed in reaching the tree and filling a box with its deadly juice, they are pardoned. But few have hardihood of nerve to survive the pestilential vapor; they generally die on the road, and the country for miles around is whitened with their bones. As the poet beautifully describes it. No foot retreating, on the sand impressed, Invites the visit of a second guest. Let me also warn women to beware of the same fatal poison. You are by nature more exposed to its fatal influence than men, your nerves are weaker, your employments are in general more sedentary, your constitutions more delicate, are more exposed to sickness and debility, which seems to call for stimulating medicines, especially when you are encumbered with a large family and sickly children, it seems as if nature required support, but beware of the opiate, and the warm sling, at first they seem to prop the constitution, but in the end they undermine it. If nature fails under the pressure of watchful nights and tedious days, make use of rich soups, or other palatable and strengthening food, with a small quantity of the best wine, it will be less likely to lead to intoxication than opium. Many kinds of bitter tea will give a tone to the stomach, and if you find your constitution sinking under the infirmities of sickness, trouble, or hard labour, you had better sink into your graves than become the slaves of Satan. Even on a bed of sickness, where the body is racked with acute pain, it is sinful for the physician to prescribe the powerful opiate.