THE ABOMINATIONS OF MODERN SOCIETY. BY REV. T. DE WITT TALMAGE, AUTHOR OF "CRUMBS SWEPT UP" 1872. PREFACE. This is a buoy swung over the rocks. If it shall keep ship, bark, fore-and-aft schooner, or hermaphrodite brig from driving on a lee shore, "all's well." The book is not more for young men than old. The Calabria was wrecked "the last day out." Nor is the book more for men than women. The best being that God ever made is a good woman, and the worst that the devil ever made is a bad one. If anything herein shall be a warning either to man or woman, I will be glad that the manuscript was caught up between the sharp teeth of the type. T.D.W.T. BROOKLYN, January 1st, 1872. CONTENTS. The Curtain Lifted Winter Nights The Power of Clothes After Midnight The Indiscriminate Dance The Massacre by Needle and Sewing-Machine Pictures in the Stock Gallery Leprous Newspapers The Fatal Ten-Strike Some of the Club-Houses Flask, Bottle, and Demijohn House of Blackness of Darkness The Gun that Kicks over the Man who Shoots it off Lies: White and Black The Good Time Coming THE ABOMINATIONS. * * * * * THE CURTAIN LIFTED. Pride of city is natural to men, in all times, if they live or have lived in a metropolis noted for dignity or prowess. Cæsar boasted of his native Rome; Lycurgus of Sparta; Virgil of Andes; Demosthenes of Athens; Archimedes of Syracuse; and Paul of Tarsus. I should suspect a man of base-heartedness who carried about with him no feeling of complacency in regard to the place of his residence; who gloried not in its arts, or arms, or behavior; who looked with no exultation upon its evidences of prosperity, its artistic embellishments, and its scientific attainments. I have noticed that men never like a place where they have not behaved well. Swarthout did not like New York; nor Dr. Webster, Boston. Men who have free rides in prison-vans never like the city that furnishes the vehicle. When I see in history Argos, Rhodes, Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, and several other cities claiming Homer, I conclude that Homer behaved well. Let us not war against this pride of city, nor expect to build up ourselves by pulling others down. Let Boston have its _Common_, its _Faneuil Hall_, its _Coliseum_, and its _Atlantic Monthly_. Let Philadelphia talk about its _Mint_, and _Independence Hall_, and _Girard College_. When I find a man living in either of those places, who has nothing to say in favor of them, I feel like asking him, "What mean thing did you do, that you do not like your native city?"