gives, at last, an instance of what the deceitful human heart, knavish as it is, is ashamed to try to cover or conceal; but confesses with helpless honesty, that it is fraud, cheating, _stealing_, _robbery_,--and nothing else. If I walk the dark street, and a perishing, hungry wretch meets me and bears off my purse with but a single dollar, the whole town awakes; the officers are alert, the myrmidons of the law scout, and hunt, and bring in the trembling culprit to stow him in the jail. But a worse thief may meet me, decoy my steps, and by a greater dishonesty, filch ten thousand dollars,--and what then? The story spreads, the sharpers move abroad unharmed, no one stirs. It is the day's conversation; and like a sound it rolls to the distance, and dies in an echo. Shall such astounding iniquities be vomited out amidst us, and no man care? Do we love our children, and yet let them walk in a den of vipers? Shall we pretend to virtue, and purity, and religion, and yet make partners of our social life, men whose heart has conceived such damnable deeds, and whose hands have performed them? Shall there be even in the eye of religion no difference between the corrupter of youth and their guardian? Are all the lines and marks of morality so effaced, is the nerve and courage of virtue so quailed by the frequency and boldness of flagitious crimes, that men, covered over with wickedness, shall find their iniquity no obstacle to their advancement among a Christian people. In almost every form of iniquity there is some shade or trace of good. We have in gambling a crime standing alone--dark, malignant, uncompounded wickedness! It seems in its full growth a monster without a tender mercy, devouring its own offspring without one feeling but appetite. A gamester, as such, is the cool, calculating, essential _spirit_ of concentrated avaricious selfishness. His intellect is a living thing, quickened with double life for villany; his heart is steel of fourfold temper. When a man _begins_ to gamble he is as a noble tree full of sap, green with leaves, a shade to beasts, and a covert to birds. When one _becomes_ a thorough gambler, he is like that tree lightning-smitten, rotten in root, dry in branch, and sapless; seasoned hard and tough; nothing lives beneath it, nothing on its branches, unless a hawk or a vulture perches for a moment to whet its beak, and fly screaming away for its prey.