THE WRAPS ARE THERE.

The girls wear their wraps around them.  The boys wear themselves around their wraps.  These wraps are brought into requisition as the physical man begins to weaken under the excessive and unnatural exercise.  Unnatural, because the hours designed by God, our maker, to be used in rest and sleep are appropriated to another and very different purpose.  Here the tempter discovers another weak point, and he makes the attack.  The great draw made upon the physical forces makes it necessary—­the tempter says—­to use an artificial stimulant, which is here often taken the first time, and which is not unfrequently repeated, until many are so much under its influence and some get so drunk—­no, become so suddenly indisposed, that they have to be carried home.  These entertainments seldom break up until the light of the morning begins to appear, but I will compromise on 2 o’clock, A.M.  At 9 or 10 o’clock, P.M., the performance begins, and I propose we shall candidly and honestly examine this basket of fruit.  Whether designed or not, it is simply a fact that many of the girls and women are dressed in such a way and manner as best and most successfully to excite the baser passions of men.

If the style of dress often, yea, nearly always, seen at the fashionable balls and dancing parties is wholly without any evil design—­innocently following a fashion—­and if those who thus dress are really ignorant of the effect it has upon the opposite sex, it is high time their eyes were being opened.  If this be only a fashion, and I want to believe it is nothing more, but when I remember distinctly that this manner of dressing for balls and dancing parties has been the fashion for forty years and that it has never changed, except to become a little more so, and that all other fashions have changed at least twenty times, my belief staggers and hangs its head for very shame.  This fruit alone has sent hundreds of thousands of men, women and girls to premature graves, dishonored graves, felons’ cells, and to an endless hell.  That this semi-nude condition, in which many girls and women are seen in the dance, has been productive of a vast deal of sin and crime, no honest man certainly will deny.  In the whirl of the gay and giddy dance, we see: 

  Strong men and women fair
  Are now within the tempter’s snare,
  With arms around each slender waist,
  Each woman held in close embrace.

  If all the thoughts could be made known
  Of seeds of crime which here are sown,
  ’Twould cause the hardest cheek to blush
  And every virtuous heart would crush.

But so it is, and ere must be, While men and women thus agree To tempt themselves, and others too, TO SINS AND CRIMES OF DEADLY HUE.

The following is the experience of a lady whose name is withheld, but who has distinguished herself in literature, and made a world-wide reputation: