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 is just about as mischievous as the perpetration of the wrong.  It is vacillation, hesitation, lack of will, feebleness of purpose, imperfect execution, that works ill in all life.  Be monarch of all you survey.  If a woman decides to do her own housework, let her go in royally among her pots and kettles and set everything a-stewing and baking and broiling and boiling, as a queen might.  If she decides not to do housework, but to superintend its doing, let her say to her servant, “Go,” and he goeth, to another, “Come,” and he cometh, to a third, “Do this,” and he doeth it, and not potter about.  So, when girls get themselves up and go to Saratoga for a regular campaign, I want their bearing to be soldierly.  Let them be gay with abandonment.  Let them take hold of it as if they liked it.  I do not affect the word flirtation, but the thing itself is not half so criminal as one would think from the animadversions visited upon it.  Of course, a deliberate setting yourself to work to make some one fall in love with you, for the mere purpose of showing your power, is abominable,—­or would be, if anybody ever did it; but I do not suppose it ever was done, except in fifth-rate novels.  What I mean is, that it is entertaining, harmless, and beneficial for young people to amuse themselves with each other to the top of their bent, if their bent is a natural and right one.  A few hearts may suffer accidental, transient injury; but hearts are like limbs, all the stronger for being broken.  Besides, where one man or woman is injured by loving too much, nine hundred and ninety-nine die the death from not loving enough.

But these Saratoga girls did neither one thing nor another.  They dressed themselves in their best, making a point of it, and failed.  They assembled themselves together of set purpose to be lively, and they were infectiously dismal.  They did not dress well:  one looked rustic; another was dowdyish; a third was over-fine; a fourth was insignificant.  Their bearing was not good, in the main.  They danced, and whispered, and laughed, and looked like