ifice 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
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
natura