many of our young men. We sit in the house on a winter's night, and
hear the storm raging on the outside, and imagine the helpless crafts
driven on the coast; but if our ears were only good enough, we could,
on any winter night, hear the crash of a hundred moral shipwrecks.

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