e of the floor, and shouts to the
musicians to go on. For it isn't safe for them to stop. Whenever they
do, there is a fight. One stalwart beauty, in bare arms, has knocked
down a young man in the entrance way, and left the marks of her high
heels on his face. She would have kicked the life out of him while her
bully held him down, if a still stronger policeman had not flung her like
a mass of offal into a corner. There she is picked up, and, backed by a
half dozen of her associates, pushes and strikes promiscuously, and the
dense crowd about her push also and strike, and sway here and there, and
yell, and hiss, and curse, until the entire police force in the place
drag out a score of them, and then the rest go on with the dancing,
between which and the fighting there is so little difference.

"In one of the boxes sits --- ---, with a masked woman. But it is
getting too warm for him. The few French women who came as spectators,
and occupied the seats in the family circle, went away long ago. They
were probably respectable. On the floor one sees at intervals well known
men, who either were deceived by the announcement of a _Bal d'Opera_, or
were too smart to be deceived by anything of this sort. A few newspaper
reporters, looking on with stoical eye; here a prize-fighter, and there a
knot of gamblers; here an adolescent alderman, dancing with a notorious
inmate of the police courts; there a deputy sheriff, too drunk to be
anything but sick and sensual. Now the can-can commences. But it comes
without any zest, for all of its peculiarities have been indulged in long
before. It is no longer a dance at all, but a wild series of indecent
exposures, a tumultuous orgie, in which one man is struck by an unknown
assailant; and his cheek laid open with a sharp ring, and his white vest
and tie splashed with blood, give a horrible color to the figure that is
led out.

"There is an evident fear on the part of the ball officials that matters
will proceed too far. They endeavor to prevent the women from being
pulled up into the boxes by laying hold of them and pulling them back, in
which struggle the women are curiously wrenched and disordered, and the
men in the boxes curse, and laugh, and shout, and the dancers, now
accustomed to the spectacle, give it no heed whatever.

"If there is anything in the behaviour of the women that is at all
peculiar to the eye of an observer who is not familiar with the impulses
and the m