p. 8 | THE BICYCLE MASHER

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 20, 1899

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 25, No. 38.

"THE BICYCLE MASHER."

A FEW days since, the New York Sun told of a champion bicycle "masher" who made the Riverside Drive the scene of his adventures. He was a "nice-looking" fellow, who, by his flattering speech and suave manner, succeeded in luring young women to places of refreshment, where he drugged them and robbed them of their money and jewels.

Many of the fashionable "drives," "promenades," and "summer resorts" are used by Satan to lure young people into trouble and frequently into ruin. At the "resort" the usual reserve of young women toward strangers is largely broken down, and this laxity opens the way for evil.

Any true gentleman will always exercise becoming reserve toward a lady. He will tolerate in himself such manners only as would be readily recognized as perfectly fitting and proper anywhere. And any young woman who has been carefully and properly trained at home will promptly and intuitively resent any unwarranted advances that may be made, even tho it be under the relaxing influences of the "resort." The stranger, even tho he be the so-called "masher," who would invite her to join him in partaking of refreshments, would be very decidedly spurned.

Indeed, is it not true that the purest type of lady-like young girls will seek to avoid allowing young men to treat them to refreshments, at least to any great extent? No girl who regards herself as she should will give any occasion whatever for the charge that she seeks to have young men be constantly giving her candy, ice-cream, soda-water, and the numerous other things that are misnamed "refreshments."

Girls can be womanly and yet be full of pleasantness and good cheer. They can be respectful and courteous to strangers, and yet be surrounded by an atmosphere of solid moral worth that produces a perceptible chill in the professional "masher." Womanly self-respect can not disguise her contempt for such fellows, and the more they flash with diamonds and otherwise display a real or pretended wealth, the more decisively will they be repelled.

Mothers should spare no pains in properly training both their boys and girls along these lines. T.