f
the senses, and not their slave.

"Well," you say, rather deprecatingly, "you can't expect young people
to act as staid and wise as you old folks. We want some fun." So you
do, and that is perfectly right. You should want fun and have fun. All
I ask is that you shall try to understand what real, true fun is.

I have seen young folks pull the chair from under some one "for fun,"
and the result was pain and perhaps permanent injury to the object of
the joke.

I have known young men to imagine they were having "fun" when they
went on a spree, to get "gloriously drunk," as they phrased it. You
can see no fun in this. You realize that it is a most serious tragedy,
with not an element of real fun in it, involving, as it does, the loss
of health, the risking of life, the possibility of crime, the
heart-break of friends, and perhaps even death. It is altogether a
wrong idea of fun.

I have known girls in the secrecy of their rooms to smoke cigarettes
"for fun," and in that I am sure that you see no amusement. It was a
lowering of the standard of womanhood; it was tampering with a poison;
it was something to be ashamed of, rather than something to call fun.

I have known young men and women to enter into flirtations "for fun."
I knew a girl whose chief delight seemed to be in getting young men in
love with her, only to cast them aside when tired of their adoration.
She called this fun, but it was cruelty. In olden times men amused
themselves by throwing Christians to wild beasts and watching them
while being torn to pieces. This was their idea of fun, and the
flirt's idea of amusement seems to be of the same order. She plays
with the man as the cat with the mouse, and experiences no pangs of
conscience when, torn and bleeding in heart, she tosses him aside for
a new victim.

There are other young people who would not enter into such serious
flirtations, and yet are unduly familiar with each other. They mean
nothing by their endearments and familiarities, and neither will
suffer any pangs when the pleasant intimacy is ended. Can we not call
this innocent fun? They have indulged in some unobserved
hand-pressures, or a few stolen kisses; but neither believed the other
to mean anything serious. It was only fun; what harm could there be in
that?

Many girls to-day are reasoning thus, and many of these may pass
through the experience without loss of reputation; they may
subsequently marry honorably, and become respected an