I cannot tell you how I drifted into habits of
dissipation, but it was not very long before I found it a very easy
matter to dispose of my salary almost as soon as received, and was
forced to borrow money of my friends to enable me to maintain myself at
all. From that I was tempted to gamble, and being fortunate at the
outset, I soon found, as I imagined, an easy way to make money without
serious labor; but I speedily discovered that my first success was
doomed to be of short life, and I began to lose more money than I had
ever won. It was after one of my losing experiences at the gaming-table,
and when I was hard pressed for money to meet my immediate wants, that I
visited Geneva, for the purpose of selling goods to some of my
customers in that place. At that time I made the acquaintance of a young
man by the name of Horace Johnson, who was a practicing dentist of that
town. Like myself, he was a wild and reckless fellow, given to
dissipation and drink, and who, like myself, had been able to conceal
the fact from his family and their friends. Johnson's prevailing vice
was an uncontrollable passion for gambling, and he had been addicted to
this practice for a long time.
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