In America Lottie Collins met with a repetition of her London success. She began her tour with an unfortunate experience. Having to remain in quarantine owing to a case of cholera which had occurred on the voyage, in her exasperation she telegraphed to her manager the concise aspersion,--“Hang America.” This indiscretion did not predispose the American people, always sensitive to the appreciation of foreigners, in her favour, and the moment when she made her bow to a New York audience was not unnaturally a critical one. That her subsequent success in the States was as great as it had been in London seems to prove that there was something more attractive in her dance than those who know it only by the melody could have imagined possible. The American idiom lends itself to a description of her performance. “Lottie Collins,” so ran the account in the leading daily paper of Kansas City, “has the stage all to herself and she bounces and dances and races all over it in the most reckless and irresponsible way, precisely as if she was a happy child so full of health and spirits that she couldn’t keep still if she wanted to. Sometimes she simply runs headlong all the way round the stage, finishing the lap with perhaps a swift whirl or two, or a whisk and a kick. Sometimes she simply jumps or bounces, and sometimes she doubles up like a pen-knife with the suddenness of a spring lock to emphasise the ‘Boom.’ She is invariably in motion except when she stops to chant the gibberish that passes for verses, but the wonder is that she has breath enough to sing after the first cyclonic interlude.” Mr Clement Scott, the dramatic critic, writing of her in the _Daily Telegraph_, confirms the impression of her antics so succinctly conveyed by the Kansas City press. “Bang goes the drum and the quiet, simple-looking, nervous figure is changed into a bacchanalian fury. But wild and wilder as the refrain grows, half-maddened as the dancer seems to become, no one can reasonably detect one trace of vulgarity or immodesty in a single movement.” Undoubtedly popular taste has undergone a radical change within the last generation. The enthusiasm which Lottie Collins aroused is much less intelligible to us now than the homage that in earlier days used to be rendered to Taglioni. Occasionally in the obscurer theatres of the provinces an agile young woman may still be seen throwing out her legs in all directions, performing the “splits” and imitating the rotation of a cart-wheel, but the sight leaves us wondrously cold. We find it difficult to understand how a former generation could have gone delirious with delight over such a display. _Autres temps, autres mœurs._ ...