something
that can make a noise makes it at intervals at one end of the room.
They all look as if they waiting for something, but nothing in
particular happens. Sometimes, after the mountain has labored awhile,
some little mouse of a boy and girl will get up, execute an antic or
two and sit down again, when everything relapses into its original
solemnity. At very long intervals somebody walks across the floor.
There is a moderate fluttering of fans and an occasional whisper.
Expectation interspersed with gimcracks seems to be the programme. The
greater part of the dancing that I saw was done by boys and girls. It
was pretty and painful. Nobody dances so well as children; no grace is
equal to their grace; but to go into a hotel at ten o'clock at night,
and see little things, eight, ten, twelve years old, who ought to be in
bed and asleep, tricked out in flounces and ribbons and all the
paraphernalia of ballet-girls, and dancing in the centre of a hollow
square of strangers,--I call it murder in the first degree. What can
mothers be thinking of to abuse their children so? Children are
naturally healthy and simple; why should they be spoiled? They will
have to plunge into the world full soon enough; why should the world be
plunged into them? Physically, mentally, and morally, the innocents
are massacred. Night after night I saw the same children led out to
the slaughter, and as I looked I saw their round, red cheeks grow thin
and white, their delicate nerves lose tone and tension, their brains
become feeble and flabby, their minds flutter out weakly in muslin and
ribbons, their vanity kindled by injudicious admiration, the sweet
child-unconsciousness withering away in the glare of indiscriminate
gazing, the innocence and simplicity and naturalness and childlikeness
swallowed up in a seething whirlpool of artificialness, all the fine,
golden butterfly-dust of modesty and delicacy and retiring girlhood
ruthlessly rubbed off forever before girlhood had even reddened from
the dim dawn of infancy. Oh! it is cruel to sacrifice children so.
What can atone for a lost childhood? What can be given in recompense
for the ethereal, spontaneous, sharply defined, new, delicious
sensations of a sheltered, untainted, opening life?

Thoroughly worked into a white heat of indignation, we leave the babes
in the wood to be despatched by their ruffian relatives, and go to
other hotel. A larger parlor, larger rows, but still three