soon learned the ways of all these places. She learned to
"spiel." You spiel by holding hands with your partner at arms' length,
and whirling round and round at the highest possible speed. The girl's
skirts are blown immodestly high, which is a detail. The effect of the
spiel is a species of drunkenness which creates an instant demand for
liquor, and a temporary recklessness of the possible results of strong
drink.

Annie also learned to dance what is known as the "half time," or the
"part time" waltz. This is a dance accompanied by a swaying and
contorting of the hips, most indecent in its suggestion. It is really a
very primitive form of the dance, and probably goes back to the pagan
harvest and bacchic festivals. You may see traces of it in certain crude
peasant dances in out-of-the-way corners of Europe. Now they teach it to
immigrant girls in New York dancing academies and dance halls, and tell
the girls that it is the _American_ fashion of waltzing.

Annie Donnelly's destruction was accomplished in less than a year. It
was the more rapid because of the really superior character of her home.
There was nothing the matter with that home except that it was too
crowded for the family to stay in it. Father and mother were
respectable, hard-working people, and after Annie's first real
misadventure, into which she fell almost unwittingly, she was afraid to
go home.

The dance hall, as we have permitted it to exist, practically
unregulated, has become a veritable forcing house of vice and crime in
every city in the United States. It is a straight chute down which,
every year, thousands of girls descend to the way of the prodigal. No
one has counted their number. All we know of the unclassed is that they
exist, apparently in ever-increasing masses.

It was estimated in Chicago, not long ago, that there were about six
thousand unfortunate women known to the police, and something like
twenty thousand who managed to avoid actual collision with the law. That
is, the latter lived quietly and plied their trade on the street so
unostentatiously that they were seldom arrested. How many of these
unfortunates reached the streets through the dance hall is impossible to
know--we only know that it constantly recruits the ranks of the
unclassed.

[Illustration: A DANCE HALL]

The dance hall may be in the rear of a saloon, or over a saloon; it may
occupy a vacant store building, or a large loft. Somewhere in its
immediate vicinit