the unsuspected confidence of a father's, a mother's, or a sister's gentle love.

Remember that the assassin's dagger, driven into your mother's heart, would be a thousand times more merciful than the faintest whisper in your childhood's home of the story of your dissipation, your dishonesty, your intemperance, your impurity.

Hearts are the soul of honor-true friendship can be made only between true men. Elect as your friends your superiors, if possible; your equals, at least; your inferiors,

never.

"Save me from my friends," is an old exclamation. The friend who led you into the abyss of sensuality or asked you to take the first drink has proven your enemy, and perhaps if he had blown your brains out he would have been a better friend. Alas! alas! for the direful contagion of evil companionship! Take counsel with wise and thoughtful men. Choose for your bosom friends men who will foster your piety and make you wiser, better and holier men. Lord Brooks was so proud of his friendship with Sir Philip Sydney that he chose for his epitaph: "Here lies Sir Philip Sydney's friend."

Choose friendships that are elevating. Walk not in the counsel of the ungodly; stand not

in the way of sinners; sit not in the seat of the scornful; spend your evenings amid cheerful enjoyments, ennobling elevations and useful ameliorations.

Be it yours with the Psalmist to say, "I am a companion of them that fear thee, and of them that keep thy precepts."

XVIII.

RACE-TRACK GAMBLING.

ONLY those people who have investigated the subject have any idea of the enormity and magnitude of the vice of gambling, especially that form of gambling inseparably allied with race-tracks. The turf-gamblers have fastened themselves upon the necks of our courts, juries and legislatures. The proprietor of the most notorious race-track in New Jersey is the dictator of the State legislature, and this week had his "starter" elected speaker. The chief income of the racing associations is the money paid for gambling privileges, and so great is the income derived from this source that the stockholders of the racing associations become enormously wealthy, and the starters and jockeys are among the highest salaried men in the land. The vast sums of money required to maintain these associations come from the boys and young men who make up the multitude of the patrons of the poolrooms. The prisons of New York and New

Jersey are full of young men who ascribe their forgery, thefts and embezzlements to their infatuation for pool-room gambling. No form of gambling offers such temptations, and the very fact that it requires so little money is why the first theft from employers is so easily made. Superintendent Byrnes says, "We are sending men to prison right along on account of the race-gambling craze."

I personally know of many homes that have been destroyed and the lives of young men blighted in the pool-rooms. I don't believe that the cultivation of a horse's speed is a sin. But the evil begins when the betting beginswhen fast horses make fast men. As horseracing is now conducted, race-tracks have become synonyms for all that is degrading in modern life. It is time that the organized gambling fraternity of the country be opposed with an organized opposition-an opposition that will expose the bought-and-sold legislators who curse the States of New York and New Jersey. These pool-rooms are the snares for our young men; they are the trainingschools of forgery and defalcation. Upon the brow of every pool-seller I write the unmistakable word "Swindler." Let our cowardly, noncommittal, professedly Christian voters wake up and send a cry to Albany for the repeal of

the Ives pool law. It is but self-defense to every banker who employs clerks, to every employer who intrusts money to other hands, to every father who has sons, to every man who loves righteousness, to join in the petition to our legislature to abolish the measure framed in the interest of vice and crime. Let the pulpits of New York and New Jersey blaze away at this, the greatest agency of vice and crime to-day, and let the people rise up and overthrow the turf-gambling monster.