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Updated: June 11, 2025
All your life you have been working for strength, for even your dancing-school teacher was not one of those scientific ballet-masters who, like Carlo Blasis, would have taught you that the strength of a muscle often deprives it of flexibility and softness. You desire that your muscles should be rigid or relaxed at will.
So I skipped and danced about among the lumber in the sight of Jacob Riis, till, in sheer amazement, he cut his finger off. He says admiration, not amazement, but I have my own ideas about that. I see him yet with his arm in a sling and a defiant look, making his way across the hall at dancing-school to engage me as his partner.
Caddy then went on to reason, how could he be expected to be a scholar when he had passed his whole life in the dancing-school and had done nothing but teach and fag, fag and teach, morning, noon, and night! And what did it matter? She could write letters enough for both, as she knew to her cost, and it was far better for him to be amiable than learned.
He illustrates his high thought by common things out of our plain New England life: the meeting of the church, the Sunday-School, the dancing-school, a huckleberry party, the boys and girls hastening home from school, the youth in the shop beginning an unconscious courtship with his unheeding customer, the farmers about their work in the fields, the bustling trader in the city, the cattle, the new hay, the voters at a town meeting, the village brawler in a tavern full of tipsy riot, the conservative who thinks the nation is lost if his ticket chances to miscarry, the bigot worshiping the knot-hole through which a dusty beam of light has looked in upon the darkness, the radical who declares that nothing is good if established, and the patent reformer who screams in your unwilling ears that he can finish the world with a single touch and out of all these he makes his poetry, or illustrates his philosophy.
More boys have died from hot-house culture than have died on boats large and small; and more boys have been made into strong and reliant men by boat-sailing than by lawn-croquet and dancing-school. And once a sailor, always a sailor. The savour of the salt never stales. The sailor never grows so old that he does not care to go back for one more wrestling bout with wind and wave.
He did not want to open it before any curious eyes. Starr's letters had been few and far between, girlish little epistles; and the last year they had ceased altogether. Starr was busy with life; finishing-school and dancing-school and music-lessons and good times. Michael was a dim and pleasant vision to her. The package contained a scarf-pin of exquisite workmanship.
"She dances so well that she shall go to dancing-school," said her mother, pleased with the pretty antics of her little girl. Kitty was delighted to hear that; for she had longed to go, and went on skipping as hard as she could, that she might learn some of the graceful steps the shoes took before the day was done. "Come, dear, stop now, and run up to your bath and bed.
He took life too seriously, that was evident; a larger degree of mental irresponsibility would be followed by a more responsible accomplishment of the realities which bore no more heavily on him than on other men; and in this the cocktails had their office. Lee agreed readily, therefore, when, on Friday afternoon, Fanny asked him to bring Helena and Gregory from dancing-school.
For him I danced the "Gavotte," the "shawl-dance," as taught to do by Monsieur Mallet, at the great dancing-school on Chestnut Street, or jumped Jim Crow to his infinite amusement and the unmitigated disgust of Evelyn, to whom his physical infirmity made him any thing but attractive.
But I hardly took note of those things, except to enlist her sympathy by posing as a wounded hero with my arm in a sling at the dancing-school which I had joined on purpose to dance with her. I was the biggest boy there, and therefore first to choose a partner, and I remember even now the snickering of the school when I went right over and took Elizabeth. She flushed angrily, but I didn't care.
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