Nevertheless, people go to the springs and drink.  Then they 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 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?