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 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 another
hotel. A larger parlor, larger rows, but still three deep and solemn. A
tall man, with a face in which melancholy seems to be giving way to
despair, a man most proper for an undertaker, but palpably out of place in
a drawing-room, walks up and down incessantly, but noiselessly, in a
persistent endeavor to bring out a dance. Now he fastens upon a newly
arrived man. Now he plants himself before a bench of misses. You can hear
the low rumble of his exhortation and the tittering replies. After a
persevering course of entreaty and persuasion, a set is drafted, the music
galvanizes, and the dance begins.

I like to see people do with their might whatsoever their hands or their
tongues or their feet find to do. A half-and-half performance of the right