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allow to pollute their sanctuaries. How melancholy it is to see a society like theirs on the decline, merely because they will not yield to its corrupting influences. Fashion at the present day is a greater evil than was slavery at the South, and it travels over the country with more than railroad speed, while to the rising generation it is as destructive as death itself. It begets habits of indolence and extravagance in youth, and what property they may have inherited is soon wasted, when having no habits of industry, they soon become poor dependents and here their career of infamy begins. How often have the fashionable youths of wealthy parents been drawn into the vortex of vice until they have been plunged into utter ruin. This truly is a prominent cause of all the failures that occur, and the fashionable family that is living up to if not beyond their means, invariably find that their expenses, instead of lessening, will constantly increase, until they are borne along with the current, their property spent, and a failure ensues; and if this evil increases at the same ratio for half a century to come, as it has done for that now past, we may read the doom of our country as did King Belshazzar that of the ill-fated city of Babylon, written with the finger of inspiration on its walls.

APRIL DAYS.

How beautiful and pleasant are the sunny days of April. The long dreary winter has passed and the balmy days of Spring have come. The rippling brooks have broken their ice bound fetters, and the snow has vanished from hill and valley. The trees and fields are beginning to clothe themselves with verdure, and the works of nature display beauty. The husbandman has dragged his plough from its resting place and commenced turning up the earth and burying the seed in its bosom. As the months advance the warmth increases and the days appear more lovely and the hazy mists that rises in the atmosphere (as the sun gradually approaches the west) and slumber in the valleys, appears like the smoke of so many bonfires. The voice of the robin and blackbird is heard, and the soft showers fall like mists upon the earth. All nature is awake, her slumbers are broken. The cattle, released from their long confinement, roam joyously over the fields, and the bleating of sheep proclaims that the icy bars of winter are burst asunder. How visibly we see the spring advance as the days glide along, and late in the month that welcome guest and forerunner of summer, the swallow, returns; at first here and there only one appears glancing by, as if scarcely able to endure the

cold. But in a few days their number is greatly increased, and they sport with much seeming pleasure in the warm sunshine. Lovely month, what happiness it affords us as the genial sun darts its rays upon the earth each succeeding day from the first of April onward.

APR 21 1922

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