Would it not be an awful thing for you to be struck with lightning some day when you had in your hand one of these paper-covered romances--the hero a Parisian _roué_, the heroine an unprincipled flirt--chapters in the book that you would not read to your children at the rate of $100 a line? Throw out all that stuff from your summer baggage. Are there not good books that are easy to read--books of entertaining travel, books of congenial history, books of pure fun, books of poetry ringing with merry canto, books of fine engravings, books that will rest the mind as well as purify the heart and elevate the whole life? My hearers, there will not be an hour between this and the day of your death when you can afford to read a book lacking in moral principle. VI. Another temptation hovering all around our watering-places is the intoxicating beverage. I am told that it is becoming more and more fashionable for woman to drink. I care not how well a woman may dress, if she has taken enough of wine to flush her cheek and put glassiness on her eyes, she is intoxicated. She may be handed into a $2500 carriage, and have diamonds enough to confound the Tiffanys--she is intoxicated. She may be a graduate of Packer Institute, and the daughter of some man in danger of being nominated for the Presidency--she is drunk. You may have a larger vocabulary than I have, and you may say in regard to her that she is "convivial," or she is "merry," or she is "festive," or she is "exhilarated," but you can not with all your garlands of verbiage cover up the plain fact that it is an old-fashioned case of drunk. Now, the watering-places are full of temptations to men and women to tipple. At the close of the tenpin or billiard-game they tipple. At the close of the cotillon they tipple. Seated on the piazza cooling themselves off they tipple. The tinged glasses come around with bright straws, and they tipple. First they take "light wines," as they call them; but "light wines" are heavy enough to debase the appetite. There is not a very long road between champagne at $5 a bottle and whiskey at five cents a glass. Satan has three or four grades down which he takes men to destruction. One man he takes up, and through one spree pitches him into eternal darkness. That is a rare case. Very seldom, indeed, can you find a man who will be such a fool as that.