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The workmen throng in dance-houses, beer-cellars, cafés, and theatres, which are all liveliest and most attractive on a Sunday; and, as they are tolerably cheap, they are generally a successful lure from deep thinking or study. Besides, the German workman has no home. If he stay there at all in holiday hours, it is to draw, or model, or sing romances to the strumming of his guitar.
It will not unnaturally follow that where there is much liberty there will be some licence, and with respect to Hamburg, it is in her dance-houses that this excess is to be found. But where is the wonder? The Hamburger authorities in this, and some other cases, set up a sort of excise officer, and grant permits for this frivolity, and that vice, at a regular scale of charges.
The worst of the dance-houses are situated near the water’s edge, and are almost wholly frequented by sailors; while the other resorts which are open to the charge of licentiousness, have also a strong proportion of maritime frequenters, and the rest is mostly made up of the wandering workmen of Germany, to many of whom Hamburg is a culminating point, and who are, as it were, out on leave.
Music was everywhere; and in the theatres, in the display of pyrotechnic eccentricities, or perhaps in ballooning—but that was English—the evening was variously spent. There may be dance-houses and other abominations in Berlin, as in Hamburg, but I never heard of them, and if they existed, more was the pity.
From the first day, the ambitious, overbearing men of the slave States take the lead in politics. They look to the extension of their gloomy "institution," negro slavery. Valois keeps much to himself. Resolutely he saves his golden gleanings. He avoids the gambling tables and dance-houses. Joe Woods works like a horse, from mere acquisitiveness.
Half the women in the town were outcasts from society two dance-houses were in full blast and 'Lige soon became known to them and their friends as the "Prophet Elijah, second edition." The mining town over the hills, at the end of 'Lige's branch, was booming, too, and wanted to be the county seat.
Quite a number of maskers, grotesquely and shabbily bedecked, had rushed out of the low dance-houses in the Guildhall Ward, and were roaring out staves of songs as they crossed the square.
It was midnight, and Deadwood lay basking in a flood of mellow moonlight that cast long shadows from the pine forest on the peaks, and glinted upon the rapid, muddy waters of Whitewood creek, which rumbles noisily by the infant metropolis on its wild journey toward the south. All the saloons and dance-houses are in full blast; shouts and maudlin yells rend the air.
We do not hear of their being so perverted; but we do not hear of them in the ball-room. The question is, has dancing such a tendency? Do impure people have dance-houses which it is a shame for a person to enter? Are young men and young women, our brothers and sisters led astray in them?
As she grew reticent to further questioning, and as the master was satisfied from her manner that she had some definite purpose beyond her usual willfulness, he passively resigned himself and followed her. Through remote groggeries, restaurants, and saloons; in gambling-hells and dance-houses, the master, preceded by M'liss, passed and repassed.
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