ed cheeks, and
they, too, are dressed in the _fashion_ with red ribbons, and blue and
green; these furnish the _disgust_ for the occasion--and one of them has
been known to furnish disgust enough for a city of ten thousand
inhabitants, and of the very best quality. Let us return to the basket
containing the young married people, and examine the fruit therein.
Reader, did you ever see the young married woman watching her husband as
he glides up and down in the merry dance, _with an old sweetheart in his
arms?_ If you never did, the first opportunity you have, take a good
look at a cat's eyes in the dark and in imagination transfer them to the
young wife's head, and you will have a very correct idea of how _sweet_
and _amiable_ she looks.

Who among the living will ever forget that poor unfortunate girl, in the
State of Georgia, who was assassinated in the ball room by a jealous
young wife? The civilized world was shocked by the announcement of this
terrible tragedy, which was purely the fruit of the ball room. These
parties were not of the low and vulgar, but were of the society people
of the age. How many husbands have in the same way and for the same
cause had all the baser, brutish passions aroused to such an extent as
to have their reasoning faculties dethroned, and have been driven by the
raging devils within to commit many of the greatest, most shameful and
most disgraceful crimes that ever blackened the records of a criminal
court? How many have cursed and abused their wives while on the way home
from the ball room? How many, after their arrival at home, have used
their superior physical strength in abusing their wives in a most
shameful and disgraceful manner? How much of all this was the result of
a frenzied imagination, and not for any real misconduct? How many of all
these cruel wrongs and outrages are never known except by the parties
themselves? How many fathers and mothers have neglected their children
by leaving them in incompetent and unsafe hands, while they spent the
night in the ball room? How many husbands have left their wives, in poor
health, sometimes sick in bed, with two or three little children crying
around them, while they have spent the night in the ball room dancing
with other women? How many men and women, and especially women, from
physical and mental causes superinduced by the effects of the ball room,
have been driven to madness, and have thus become inmates of insane
asylums, or have de