The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8

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worshipers of Persia and Peru danced about the visible sign and manifestation to their deity. Dervishes dance in frenzy, and the Shakers jump up and come down hard through excess of the Spirit. All the gods have danced with all the goddesses-round dances, too. The lively divinities created by the Greeks in their own image danced divinely, as became them. Old Thor stormed and thundered down the icy halls o

nation that inspires the growing tree and upheaves the hill. And, if I err not, there is sound Scripture for the belief that these self same eminences have capacity to skip for joy. The peasant dances-a trifle clumsily-at harvest feast when the grain is garnered. The stars in heaven dance visibly, the firefly dances in emulation of the stars. The sunshine dances on the wate

will not deny that gunpowder has aptitudes of mischief; and from the point of view of a nigger ordered upon the safety-valve of a racing steamboat, the vapor of water is a thing accurst. Shall we condemn music because the lute makes "lascivious pleasing?" Or poetry because some amorous bard tells in warm rhyme the story of the passions, and Swinburne has had the goodness to make vice offensive with his hymns in its praise? Or sculpture because from the guiltless marble may be wrought a drunken Silenus or a lechering satyr?-painting because the untamed fancies of a painter sometimes break tether and run riot on his canvas? Because the orator may provoke the wild passions of the mob, shall there be no more public speaking?-no further acting because the actor may be pleased to saw the air, or the actress display her ultimate i

pportunity!" simpers the tedious virgin past the wall-flower of her youth. "Opportuni

Briareus rolled into one. He has a hundred heads to plan his poachings, a hundred eyes to spy the land, a hundred hands to set his snares and springes. In the country where young girls are habitually unattended in the street; where the function of chaperon is commonly, and, it should be added, intelligently performed by some capable young male; where the young women receive evening calls from young men concerning whose presence in the parlor mamma in the nursery and papa at the "office"-poor, overworked papa!-give themselves precious little trouble,-this prate of ball-room opportunity is singularly a

ated some of the "thoughtful minds" in our midst. By degrees they lost their preeminence, they were seen to be in process of solution without social cataclysm, they have, in a manner been referred for disp

estion may rather be put-to borrow phraseology current among her critics: Had she oughter?-from a moral point of view, now. From a moral point,

the rest of them, are not now in question; the simple question is: Is it immoral to smoke? And again-still from the mora

ss "Mu

ike plays may rel

om the same elevated view-p

y and concerned for him who is innocent of the knowledge of good and evil that lurk respectively in Chambertin and cheap "claret." Nor is my compassion altogether free from a sense of superiority to the object of it-superiority untainted, howbeit, by truculence. I perceive that life has been bestowed upon him for purposes inscrutable to me, tho

ruded to trip us in our dance, shall we not stamp on them? Yea, ver