Connecticut western news., 1898-06-23


 ments involved ill the coloring; if you show them beautiful rose, they will submit it to a botanical analysis, which is only the post mortem examination of a flower. They never do anything more than feebly smile. There are no great tides of feeling surging up from the depth of their soul in pillow after bill low of reverberating laughter. They seem as if nature had built them by contract and made a bungling job out of it. But, blessed be God, there are people in the world who have bright faces and whose life is a song an an them, a pean of victory. Even their troubles are like the vines that crawl up the side of great tower on the top of which the sunlight sits and the soft airs of summer hold perpetual carnival. They are the people you like to have come to your house; they are the people l like to have come to my house. Now it is these exhilarant and sympathetic and warm hearted people that are most tempted to pernicious amusements In proportion as ship is swift it wants strong helmsman; in proportion as horse is gay it wants a strong driver, and these people of ex- uberant nature will do we'll to look at the reaction of all their amusements. If an amusement sends you home at night nervous so you cannot sleep, and you rise in the morning. not because you are slept out, but because your duty drags you from your slumbers, you have been where you ought not to have been. There are amusements that send a man next day to his work bloodshot yawning, stupid, nauseated and they are wrong kinds of amusements. There are entertainments that give man dis gust with the drudgery of life, with tools because they are not swords, with working aprons because they are not robes, with cattle because they are not infuriated bulls of the arena. If any amusement sends you home longing for life of romance and thrilling adyen- ture. love that takes poison and shoots itself, moonlight adventures and hair breadth escapes, you may depend upon it that you are the sacrificed victim of unsanctifed pleasure. Our recreations are intended to build US up, and if they pull us down as to our moral or as to our physical strength, you may come to the conclusion that they are obnox- ious.
 Still further, those amusements are wrong which lead into expenditure be- yond your means. Money spent in recre ation is not thrown away. It is all folly for us to come from place of amuse- ment feeling that we have wasted our money and time. You may by it have made an investment worth moro than the transaction that yielded you $100 or $1, 900. But how many properties have been riddled by costly amuse- ments? The table has been robbed to pay the club. The champagne has cheated the children's wardrobe. The carousing party has burned up the boys primer. The tablecloth of the corner saloon is in debt to the wife's faded dress-excursions that in a day make tour around whole months wages; ladies whose lifetime business it is to Ego shopping have their counterpart in uneducated children, bankruptcies that shock the money market and appall the church and that send drunkenness staggering across the richly figured car pet of the mansion and dashing into the mirror and drowning out the carol of music with the whooping of bloated sons come home to break their old mothers heart. When men go into amusements that they cannot afford, they first borrow what they cannot earn, and then they steal what they cannot borrow. First they go into em- barrassment and then into theft and when a man gets as far on as that he does not stop short of the penitentiary. There is not prison i'll the land where there are not victims of unsanctitied amusements. How often l have had parents come to me and ask nc to go and beg their boy off from the conse- quence of crimes that he had committed against his employer-the taking of funds out of the employers till or the disarrangement of the accounts. Why, he had salary enough to pay all lawful expenditure, but not enough salary to meet his sinful amusements. And again and again have gone and implored for the young man-sometimes, alas, the petition unavailing!
 How brightly the path of unrestrain- ed amusement opensl The young man says: "Now I am off for good time. Never mind economy. I'll get money somehow. What fine road! What a beautiful day for a ride! Crack the whip, and over the turnpike Come, boys, fill high your glassesl Drink Long life, health, plenty of rides just like thisp' Hardworking men hear the chatter of the hoofs and look up and say: Why, I wonder where those fellows get their money from. We have to toll and drudge They do nothing" To these gay men life is a thrill and an ex- citement They stare at other people and in turn are stared at. The watch chain jingles. The cup foams. The night hears their guffaw. They swag- ger. They jostie decent men off the side walk. They take the name of God in vain. They parody the hymn they learned at their mothers knee, and to all pictures of coming disaster they cry out, "Who caresp' and to the counsel of some Christian friend, "Who are you" Passing along the street some
 
 night you hear shriek in a grogshop, the rattle of the watchman's club, the rush of the police. What is the matter now? Oh, this reckless young man has been killed in grogshop fight. Garry him home to his fathers house. Parents will come down and wash his wounds and close his eyes in death. They for give him all he ever did, though he can not in silence askit. The prodigal has got home at last. Mother will go to her little garden and get the sweetest flow CTS and twist them into chaplet for the silent heart of the wayward boy and push back from the bloated brow the long locks that were once her pride. And the air will be rent with the fa- ther's cry, "Oh, my son, my son, my poor son; would God I had died for IL