whistle.

At last there was something to do in those long, empty summer evenings,
when the married people sat like images on their front porches, and the
boys and girls tramped and tramped the board sidewalks--northward to the
edge of the open prairie, south to the depot, then back again to the
post-office, the ice-cream parlor, the butcher shop. Now there was a place
where the girls could wear their new dresses, and where one could laugh
aloud without being reproved by the ensuing silence. That silence seemed
to ooze out of the ground, to hang under the foliage of the black maple
trees with the bats and shadows. Now it was broken by light-hearted
sounds. First the deep purring of Mr. Vanni's harp came in silvery ripples
through the blackness of the dusty-smelling night; then the violins fell
in--one of them was almost like a flute. They called so archly, so
seductively, that our feet hurried toward the tent of themselves. Why had
n't we had a tent before?

Dancing became popular now, just as roller skating had been the summer
before. The Progressive Euchre Club arranged with the Vannis for the
exclusive use of the floor on Tuesday and Friday nights. At other times
any one could dance who paid his money and was orderly; the railroad men,
the Round House mechanics, the delivery boys, the iceman, the farmhands
who lived near enough to ride into town after their day's work was over.

I never missed a Saturday night dance. The tent was open until midnight
then. The country boys came in from farms eight and ten miles away, and
all the country girls were on the floor,--Antonia and Lena and Tiny, and
the Danish laundry girls and their friends. I was not the only boy who
found these dances gayer than the others. The young men who belonged to
the Progressive Euchre Club used to drop in late and risk a tiff with
their sweethearts and general condemnation for a waltz with "the hired
girls."

IX

THERE was a curious social situation in Black Hawk. All the young men felt
the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come to town
to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle
out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family
to go to school.

Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got
little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters, for
whom they made such sacrifices and who have had "advantages," never seem