couldn't help
dancing; they looked as if they felt so "corky" it was hard to keep them
down.

--And yet they had been through such work to get their limbs strong and
flexible and obedient, that a cart-horse lives an easy life compared to
theirs while they were in training.

--The Master cut in just here--I had sprung the trap of a reminiscence.

--When I was a boy,--he said,--some of the mothers in our small town, who
meant that their children should know what was what as well as other
people's children, laid their heads together and got a dancing-master to
come out from the city and give instruction at a few dollars a quarter to
the young folks of condition in the village. Some of their husbands were
ministers and some were deacons, but the mothers knew what they were
about, and they did n't see any reason why ministers' and deacons' wives'
children shouldn't have as easy manners as the sons and daughters of
Belial. So, as I tell you, they got a dancing-master to come out to our
place,--a man of good repute, a most respectable man,--madam (to the
Landlady), you must remember the worthy old citizen, in his advanced age,
going about the streets, a most gentlemanly bundle of infirmities,--only
he always cocked his hat a little too much on one side, as they do here
and there along the Connecticut River, and sometimes on our city
sidewalks, when they've got a new beaver; they got him, I say, to give us
boys and girls lessons in dancing and deportment. He was as gray and as
lively as a squirrel, as I remember him, and used to spring up in the air
and "cross his feet," as we called it, three times before he came down.
Well, at the end of each term there was what they called an "exhibition
ball," in which the scholars danced cotillons and country-dances; also
something called a "gavotte," and I think one or more walked a minuet.
But all this is not what--I wanted to say. At this exhibition ball he
used to bring out a number of hoops wreathed with roses, of the perennial
kind, by the aid of which a number of amazingly complicated and startling
evolutions were exhibited; and also his two daughters, who figured
largely in these evolutions, and whose wonderful performances to us, who
had not seen Miss Taglioni or Miss Elssler, were something quite
bewildering, in fact, surpassing the natural possibilities of human
beings. Their extraordinary powers were, however, accounted for by the
following explanation, which was accepte