Those who can carry their minds back for twenty years
must remember the foolish young nobleman who sold a splendid estate to
pay the yelling vulgarians of the betting-ring. They cheered him when he
all but beggared himself; they hissed him when he failed once to pay.
With lost health, lost patrimony, lost hopes, lost self-respect, he sank
amid the rough billows of life's sea, and only one human creature was
there to aid him when the great last wave swept over him. Lost
days--lost days! Youths who are going to ruin now amid the plaudits of
those who live upon them might surely take warning: but they do not, and
their bones will soon bleach on the mound whereon those of all other
wasters of days have been thrown. When I think of the lost days and the
lost lives of which I have cognizance, then it seems as though I were
gazing on some vast charnel-house, some ghoul-haunted place of skulls.
Memories of those who trifled with life come to me, and their very faces
flash past with looks of tragic significance. By their own fault they
were ruined; they were shut out of the garden of their gifts; their city
of hope was ploughed and salted. The past cannot be retrieved, let
canting optimists talk as they choose; what has been has been, and the
effects will last and spread until the earth shall pass away.
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