Alas, think of the crowd, the rank odours, the straining heart-beats!  Does he hear any wisdom?  Listen to the hideous badinage, the wild bursts of foul language from the betting-men, the mean, cunning drivel of the gamblers, the shrill laughter of the horsey and unsexed women?  Does the youth make friends?  Ah, yes!  He makes friends who will cheat him at betting, cheat him at horse-dealing, cheat him at gambling when the orgies of the course are over, borrow money as long as he will lend, and throw him over when he has parted with his last penny and his last rag of self-respect.  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.  Our acts our angels are, or good or ill; our fatal shadows that walk by us still.  The thing done lasts for eternity; the lightest act of man or woman has incalculably vast results.  So it is madness to say that the lost days can be retrieved.  They cannot!  But by timely wisdom we may save the days and make them beneficent and fruitful in the future.  Watch those wild lads who are sowing in wine what they reap in headache and degradation.  Night after night they laugh with senseless glee, night after night inanities which pass for wit are poured forth; and daily the nerve and strength of each carouser grow weaker.  Can you retrieve those nights?  Never!  But you may take the most shattered of the crew and assure him that all is not irretrievably lost; his weakened nerve may be steadied, his deranged gastric functions may gradually grow more healthy, his distorted views of life may pass away.  So far, so good; but never try to persuade any one that the past may be repaired, for that delusion is the very source and spring of the foul stream of lost days.  Once impress upon any teachable creature the stern fact that a lost day is lost for ever, once make that belief part of his being, and then he will strive to cheat death.  Perhaps it may be thought that I take sombre views of life.  No; I see that the world may be made a place of pleasure, but only by learning and obeying the inexorable laws which govern all things, from the fall of a seed of grass to the moving of the miraculous brain of man.