ten. The loss of
earthly possessions is of little consequence when compared with the loss
of health, happiness, purity and virtue.

I simply tell you this to show you how many evils a dancing master is
cognizant of in connection with dancing, that the generality of people
know little or nothing about.

Some one has said that few people know better than the dancing master
and saloon keeper, how many souls are sent through the port holes of
hell between the ages of fourteen and twenty by these two agencies of
the devil.

And he is right.

The heart of the dancing master must be even harder than that of the
saloon keeper, for while the saloon keeper must witness the harmful and
disgraceful indulgence of men, principally, he knows that there is a
chance that it may prove only a harmful indulgence.

But the man who can constantly see pure and lovely women being whirled
to a disgrace from which she can never recover must have a heart hard
indeed. Yet this is what I have witnessed and helped to perpetuate by
teaching dancing. Still I heedlessly continued in the business, until
something occurred which set me to thinking.

I met on a train, while leaving town, one day a young woman, who, a few
months before, had been a member of my select dancing academy. She had
been ruined there, and was one of the discarded ones when the school was
closed for a few weeks, as all dancing-schools have to be every little
while, to get rid of those girls who have met with a fate similar to
hers.

I entered into conversation with her and found she could no longer
endure being shunned and slighted by all her old companions, and was
running away from home. I knew that her parents would be heart broken,
and that she, without the protection of a home, would soon sink to utter
abandonment, and I tried every persuasion to induce her to return to the
home she was leaving. I--who was still teaching the very thing which had
been her ruin, now that self-respect and all for which life was worth
the living, was lost to her forever--I tried to save her from further
degradation.

After I had argued for some time with her she turned fiercely upon me,
her once beautiful eyes now filled with a desperation born of despair,
and said, with a look and tone of reproach which I shall never forget:
"Mr. Faulkner, when you will close your dancing schools and stop this
business, which is sending so many girls by swift stages on a straight
road to hell, _then, s