At the first place they visited they had difficulty in gaining entrance, for a crowd was held in check by the heavy plush cord stretched across the door to the restaurant proper; but here again Wharton's name proved potent. The barrier was lowered, and the party managed to squeeze their way into a badly ventilated Turkish room, where a demented darky orchestra was drumming upon various instruments ranging in resonance from a piano to a collection of kitchen utensils. Tables had been crowded around the walls and into the balcony so closely that the occupants rubbed shoulders, but the center of the lower floor was occupied by a roped corral in which a mass of dancers were revolving like a herd of milling cattle. Dusty, tobacco-smoked oriental rugs, banners and lanterns, suspended from walls and balcony railings, lent a semblance of "color" to the place; little Moorish alcoves were set into the walls, in and out of which undersized waiters dodged like rabbits in a warren. The attendants were irritable; they perspired freely, they bumped into people, squeezed past, or, failing in that, crawled over the seated guests. After a breathless half-hour of this the three sought a resort farther up-town, where they found the entire upper floors of a restaurant building given over to "trotting." During the previous winter the craze for dancing had swept New York like a plague, and the various Barbary Coast figures had reached their highest popularity. Here, too, the rooms were thronged and the tables taken, despite the lateness of the season, but for a second time Wharton demonstrated that to a man about town of his accomplishments no place is really closed. However loud the protest against this latest fad, it is doubtful if its effect is wholly harmful, for it at least introduced vigorous exercise and rhythmic movement into the midnight life of the city. Women went home in the gray dawn with faces flushed from natural causes; exquisite youths of nocturnal habits learned to perspire and to know the feeling of a wilted collar.