these
schools through want of food. Hundreds enter our lodging-houses every
night, who have no home. Hundreds apply to our office for a place in the
country, who are ragged, half-starved, and utterly unbefriended."

III. FASHIONABLE FOLLIES.

We have spoken of the women of fashion. What shall we say of the men?
They are neither refined nor intellectual. They have a certain
shrewdness coupled, perhaps, with the capacity for making money. Their
conversation is coarse, ignorant, and sometimes indecent. They have not
the tact which enables women to adapt themselves at once to their
surroundings, and they enjoy their splendors with an awkwardness which
they seek to hide beneath an air of worldly wisdom. They patronize the
drama liberally, but their preference is for what Olive Logan calls "the
leg business." In person they are coarse-looking. Without taste of
their own, they are totally dependent upon their tailors for their
"style," and are nearly all gotten up on the same model. They are
capital hands at staring ladies out of countenance, and are masters of
all the arts of insolence. Society cannot make gentlemen out of them do
what it will. As John Hibbs would say, "they were not brought up to it
young." They learn to love excitement, and finding even the reckless
whirl of fashion too stale for them, seek gratification out of their own
homes. They become constant visitors at the great gaming-houses, and are
the best customers of the bagnios of the city.

If men have their dissipations, the women have theirs also. Your
fashionable woman generally displays more tact than her husband. She has
greater opportunities for display, and makes better use of them. If the
ball, or party, or sociable at her residence is a success, the credit is
hers exclusively, for the husband does little more than pay the bills.
Many of these women are "from the ranks." They have risen with their
husbands, and are coarse and vulgar in appearance, and without
refinement. But the women of fashion are not all vulgar or unrefined.
Few of them are well educated, but the New York woman of fashion, as a
rule, is not only very attractive in appearance, but capable of creating
a decided impression upon the society in which she moves. She is
thoroughly mistress of all its arts, she knows just when and where to
exercise them to the best advantage, she dresses in a style the
magnificence of which is indescribable, and she has tact