go to the bowling-alleys and bowl. In the evening, if you are hilariously
inclined, you can make the tour of the hotels. In each one you see a large
and brilliantly lighted parlor, along the four sides of which are women
sitting solemn and stately, in rows three deep, with a man dropped in here
and there, about as thick as periods on a page, very young or very old or
in white cravats. A piano or a band or something that can make a noise
makes it at intervals at one end of the room. They all look as if they
were 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 child-likeness 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 sacr