for children
and country visitors should have been so long abandoned to the most
ignorant of the community. Every large town needs a place of amusement
to which children can be occasionally taken, and it would not be
difficult to arrange an establishment that would afford them great
delight and do them no harm. How monstrous to lure boys to such a place
as this "Sacred Museum,"--or to the "Museum" in New York, where a great
creature, in the form of a woman, performs, in flesh-colored tights, the
part of Mazeppa!

In all the large Western cities there is a place of evening
entertainment called the "Varieties Theatre," which ladies never attend,
and in which three pleasures may be enjoyed at once,--smoking, drinking
lager-bier, and witnessing a performance upon the stage. The chief
patrons of these establishments are gentlemen connected with navigation,
and very young men who, for the price of a ticket, a cigar, and a glass
of beer, purchase the flattering delusion that they are "seeing life,"
and "going it with a perfect looseness." The performances consist of
Ethiopian minstrelsy, comic songs, farces, and the dancing of "beauteous
Terpsichorean nymphs"; and these succeed one another with not a minute's
intermission for three or four hours. At St. Louis, where gentlemen
connected with navigation are numerous, the Varieties Theatre is large,
highly decorated, conducted at great expense, and yields a very large
revenue. To witness the performance, and to observe the rapture
expressed upon the shaggy and good-humored countenances of the boatmen,
was interesting, as showing what kind of banquet will delight a human
soul starved from its birth. It likes a comic song very much, if the
song refers to fashionable articles of ladies' costume, or holds up to
ridicule members of Congress, policemen, or dandies. It is not averse to
a sentimental song, in which "Mother, dear," is frequently
apostrophized. It delights in a farce from which most of the dialogue
has been cut away, while all the action is retained,--in which people
are continually knocked down, or run against one another with great
violence. It takes much pleasure in seeing Horace Greeley play a part in
a negro farce, and become the victim of designing colored brethren. But
what joy, when the beauteous Terpsichorean nymph bounds upon the scene,
rosy with paint, glistening with spangles, robust with cotton and cork,
and bewildering with a cloud of gauzy skirts! What a vis