ustry is that of "cutting in"
at dances. All through the South it is carried on, but whereas in such
cities as Memphis, New Orleans and Atlanta, men show a little mercy to
the stranger--realizing that, as he is presumably unacquainted with all
the ladies at a dance, he cannot retaliate in kind--Birmingham is
merciless and prosecutes the pestilential practice unremittingly, even
going so far as to apply the universal-service principle and call out
her highschool youths to carry on the work. Before I went to certain
dances in Birmingham I felt that high-school boys ought to be kept at
home at night, but after attending these dances I realized that such
restriction was altogether inadequate, and that the only way to deal
with them effectively would be to pickle them in vitriol.

Where, in other cities of the South, I have managed to dance as much as
half a dance without interruption, I never danced more than twenty feet
with one partner in Birmingham. Nor did my companion.

Our host was energetic in presenting us to ladies of infinite
pulchritude and State-wide terpsichorean reputation, but we would start
to tread a measure with them, only to have them swiftly snatched from us
by some spindle-necked, long-wristed, big-boned, bowl-eared high-school
youth, in a dinner suit which used to fit him when it was new, six
months ago.

As we would start to dance the lady would say:

"You-all ah strangehs, ahn't you?"

We would reply that we were.

"Wheh do you come from?"

"New York."

Then, because the Hardware Convention was being held in town at the
time, she would continue:

"Ah reckon you-all ah hahdware men?"

But that was as far as the conversation ever got. Just about the time
that she began to reckon we were hardware men a mandatory hand would be
laid upon us, and before we had time to defend ourselves against the
hardware charge, the lady would be wafted off in the arms of some
predatory youth who ought to have been at home considering _pons
asinorum_.

Had we indeed been hardware men, and had we had our hardware with us,
they could have done with fewer teachers in the high schools of that
city after the night of our first dance in Birmingham.

* * * * *

Up in the hills, some miles back of the Country Club, on the banks of a
large artificial lake, stands the new clubhouse of the Birmingham Motor
and Country Club, and around the lake runs the club's
two-and-a-half-mile speed