In a general way, the lawn sloped downward toward the road, so that we could see nearly the whole of it over the high, and ugly, board fence which inclosed it. Under the trees, a little way back, I observed a group of young girls lolling in hammocks and idling in rustic chairs. They caught sight of us and sprang up, laughing boistterously. I thought they were going to run away in pretended and playful flight; but instead, they came toward us, and blew kisses at us off their fingers. I looked at Severnius. "What does this mean?" I asked. "Why," he said, and the blush mantled his handsome face again, "this place is the counterpart of Cupid's Gardens,--a resort for men." "I thought so," I replied. By-and-by he remarked, "I hope you will not form too bad an opinion of us, my friend! You have learned to-day what horrible evils exist among us, but I assure you that the sum total of the people who practice them constitutes but a small proportion of our population. And the good people here, the great majority, look upon these things with the same aversion and disgust that you do, and are doing their best--or they think they are--to abolish them." "How?--by legislation?" I asked. "Partly; but more through education. Our preachers and teachers have taken the matter up, but they are handicapped by the delicacy of the question and the privacy involved in it, which seems to hinder discussion even, and to forestall advice. Though this is the only way to accomplish anything, I think. I have very little faith in legislative measures against secret vices; it is like trying to dam a stream which cannot be dammed but must break out somewhere. I am convinced that my friends, the Caskians, have solved the question in the only possible way,--by elevating and purifying the marriage relation. I hope some good may be accomplished by the visit of the few who are coming here!" "Will they preach or lecture?" I asked, with what seemed to me a moment later to be stupid simplicity. "O, no!" replied Severnius, with the same air of modest but emphatic protest which they themselves would have doubtless assumed had the question been put to them. "It was simply their personal influence I had reference to. I do not know that I can make you understand, but their presence always seemed to me like a disinfectant of evil. With myself, when I was among them, all the good that was in me responded to their nobility; the evil in me slept, I suppose." I made a skeptical rejoinder to the implication in his last sentence, for to me he seemed entirely devoid of evil; and we finished the drive in silence. Chapter 7. NEW FRIENDS. "Having established his equality with class after class, of those with whom he would live well, he still finds certain others, before whom he cannot possess himself, because they have somewhat fairer, somewhat grander, somewhat purer, which extorts homage of him."--EMERSON.