ks.

Many who came last September to town, by the first of March will have
been blasted. It only takes one winter to ruin a young man. When the
long winter evenings have come, many of our young men will improve
them in forming a more intimate acquaintance with books, contracting
higher social friendships, and strengthening and ennobling their
characters. But not so with all. I will show you before I get through
that, at this season of the year, temptations are especially rampant:
and my counsel is, _Look out how you spend your winter nights!_

I remark, first, that there is no season of the year in which vicious
allurements are so active.

In warm weather, places of dissipation win their tamest triumphs.
People do not feel like going, in the hot nights of summer, among the
blazing gas-lights, or breathing the fetid air of assemblages. The
receipts of the grog-shops in a December night are three times what
they are in any night in July or August. I doubt not there are
larger audiences in the casinos in winter than in the summer weather.
Iniquity plies a more profitable trade. December, January, and
February are harvest-months for the devil. The play-bills of the low
entertainments then are more charming, the acting is more exquisite,
the enthusiasm of the spectators more bewitching. Many a young man who
makes out to keep right the rest of the year, capsizes now. When he
came to town in the autumn, his eye was bright, his cheek rosy, his
step elastic; but, before spring, as you pass him you will say to your
friend, "What is the matter with that young man?" The fact is that one
winter of dissipation has done the work of ruin.

This is the season for parties; and, if they are of the right kind,
our social nature is improved, and our spirits cheered up. But many
of them are not of the right kind; and our young people, night after
night, are kept in the whirl of unhealthy excitement until their
strength fails, and their spirits are broken down, and their taste for
ordinary life corrupted; and, by the time the spring weather comes,
they are in the doctor's hands, or sleeping in the cemetery. The
certificate of their death is made out, and the physician, out of
regard for the family, calls the disease by some Latin name, when the
truth is that they died of too many parties.

Away with these wine-drinking convivialities! How dare you, the
father of a household, trifle with the appetites of our young people?
Perhaps, out of