"The price of admission is ten groschen (about twenty cents), which insures a company who can pay. The male public are of all conditions, and include students, clerks, and artists, with, of course, a fair share of rogues and pickpockets. The majority of the women are prostitutes: there may be found girls of rare beauty, steeped to the lips in all the arts of iniquity. The philosopher may see life essentially in the same grade as in the last description, but in a somewhat less artificial condition. Scenes of bacchant excitement and of wildest abandonment may be witnessed here. The outward show is all mirth and happiness; pleasure unrestrained seems the business of the place. Turn the picture. The most showy of the costumes are hired; the gayety is for a living; the liberty is licentiousness. These creatures, who, all blithesome as they seem, the victims of others who fleece them of every thing they can earn, are now engaged in securing victims from whom they may wring the gains which are to pay the hire of their elegant dresses, or furnish means for further excesses, or perhaps to pay for their supper that evening. It is the fashion of the place for each _gentleman_ to invite a _lady_ to supper, where the quantity of wine drunk is incredible. How many a young man has to trace not merely loss of cash and health to such a place, but also loss of honor! The _ladies_ who have no such agreeable partners sit apart, sullen and discontented; oftentimes they have no money to pay for their own refreshments. Pair by pair the crowd diminishes, until toward three or four o'clock, when the place is closed." The lowest dancing-houses are the _Tanz wirthschaften_, inferior to the saloons, where (again quoting)