A man drew in a lottery fifty thousand dollars, sold his ticket for forty-two thousand five hundred dollars, and yet did not have enough to pay the charges against him for lottery tickets.  He owed the brokers forty-five thousand dollars.

An editor writes—­“A man who, a few years ago, was blest with about twenty thousand dollars (lottery money), yesterday applied to us for ninepence to pay for a night’s lodging.”

A highly respectable gentleman drew twenty thousand dollars in a lottery; bought more tickets, and drew again; bought more—­drew more largely; then rushed down headlong until he was pronounced by the select men of the village a vagabond, and his children were picked up from the street half starved and almost naked.

A hard-working machinist draws a thousand dollars; thenceforth he is disgusted with work, opens a rum grocery, is utterly debauched, and people go in his store to find him dead, close beside his rum-cask.

It would take a pen plucked from the wing of the destroying angel and dipped in blood to describe this lottery business.

A man committed suicide in New York, and upon his person was found a card of address giving a grog-shop as his boarding house, three blank lottery tickets, and a leaf from Seneca’s Morals, containing an apology for self-murder.

One lottery in London was followed by the suicide of fifty persons who held unlucky numbers.

There are men now, with lottery tickets in their pocket, which, if they have not sense enough to tear up or throw into the fire, will be their admission ticket at the door of the damned.  As the brazen gates swing open they will show their tickets, and pass in and pass down.  As the wheel of eternal Fortune turns slowly round, they will find that the doom of those who have despised God and imperilled their souls will be their awful prize.

God forbid that you, my reader, should ever take to yourself the lamentation of the Boston clerk, who, in eight months, had embezzled eighteen thousand dollars from his employer and expended it all in lottery tickets.  “I have for the last seven months gone fast down the broad road.  There was a time, and that but a few months since, when I was happy, because I was free from debt and care.  The moment of the first steps in my downfall was about the middle of last June, when I took a share in a company, bought lottery tickets whereby I was successful in obtaining a share of one-half of the capital prize, since which I have gone for myself.  I have lived and dragged out a miserable existence for two or three months past.  Oh, that the seven or eight months past of my existence could be blotted out; but I must go, and, ere this paper is read, my spirit has gone to my Maker, to give an account of my misdeeds here, and to receive the eternal sentence for self-destruction and abused confidence.  Relatives and friends I have, from whom I do not wish to part under such circumstances, but necessity compels.  Oh, wretch! lottery tickets have been thy ruin.  But I cannot add more.”