oduces the two parties to each
other. He gets them to pledge their troth. He appoints where they
shall meet. He shows them where they can find officiating minister or
squire. He points out to them the ticket office for the rail train. He
puts them aboard, and when they are going at forty miles the hour he
jumps off and leaves them in the lurch; for, while Satan has a genius
in getting people into trouble, he has no genius for getting people
out. He induced Jonah to take ship for Tarshish when God told him to
go to Nineveh, but provided for the recreant prophet no better
landing-place than the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.

THE DIME NOVEL.

The modern novel is responsible for many of these abscondings. Do you
think that young women would sit up half a night reading novels in
which the hero and heroine get acquainted in the usual way, and carry
on their increased friendliness until, with the consent of parents,
the day of marriage is appointed, and amid the surrounding group of
kindred the vows are taken? Oh, no! There must be flight, and pursuit,
and narrow escape, and drawn dagger, all ending in sunshine, and
parental forgiveness, and bliss unalloyed and gorgeous. In many of the
cases of escapade the idea was implanted in the hot brain of the woman
by a cheap novel, ten cents' worth of unadulterated perdition.

THE SCHEME OF BAD MEN.

These evasions of the ordinary modes of marriage are to be deplored
for the reason that nearly all of them are proposed by bad men. If the
man behave well he has a character to which he can refer, and he can
say: "If you want to inquire about me there is a list of names of
people in the town or neighborhood where I live." No; the heroes of
escapades are nearly all either bigamists, or libertines, or
drunkards, or defrauders, or first-class scoundrels of some sort. They
have no character to lose. They may be dressed in the height of
fashion, may be cologned, and pomatumed, and padded, and
diamond-ringed, and flamboyant-cravatted, until they bewitch the eye
and intoxicate the olfactories; but they are double-distilled extracts
of villainy, moral dirt and blasphemy. Beware of them. "Stolen waters
are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he knoweth not
that the dead are there."

SOCIAL DEGRADATION.

Fugitive marriage is to be deplored because it almost always implies
woman's descent from a higher social plane to a lower. If the man was
not of a higher plane, or th