o observed that it
was nothing but right to do something to please the young squire, in
return for what he had done for them. You will be the less surprised
at this opinion in so grave a personage when you learn that Ben had
requested Mr. Rann to accompany him on the fiddle, and Joshua felt quite
sure that though there might not be much in the dancing, the music would
make up for it. Adam Bede, who was present in one of the large marquees,
where the plan was being discussed, told Ben he had better not make a
fool of himself--a remark which at once fixed Ben's determination: he
was not going to let anything alone because Adam Bede turned up his nose
at it.

"What's this, what's this?" said old Mr. Donnithorne. "Is it something
you've arranged, Arthur? Here's the clerk coming with his fiddle, and a
smart fellow with a nosegay in his button-hole."

"No," said Arthur; "I know nothing about it. By Jove, he's going to
dance! It's one of the carpenters--I forget his name at this moment."

"It's Ben Cranage--Wiry Ben, they call him," said Mr. Irwine; "rather
a loose fish, I think. Anne, my dear, I see that fiddle-scraping is too
much for you: you're getting tired. Let me take you in now, that you may
rest till dinner."

Miss Anne rose assentingly, and the good brother took her away, while
Joshua's preliminary scrapings burst into the "White Cockade," from
which he intended to pass to a variety of tunes, by a series of
transitions which his good ear really taught him to execute with some
skill. It would have been an exasperating fact to him, if he had known
it, that the general attention was too thoroughly absorbed by Ben's
dancing for any one to give much heed to the music.

Have you ever seen a real English rustic perform a solo dance? Perhaps
you have only seen a ballet rustic, smiling like a merry countryman in
crockery, with graceful turns of the haunch and insinuating movements
of the head. That is as much like the real thing as the "Bird Waltz" is
like the song of birds. Wiry Ben never smiled: he looked as serious as a
dancing monkey--as serious as if he had been an experimental philosopher
ascertaining in his own person the amount of shaking and the varieties
of angularity that could be given to the human limbs.

To make amends for the abundant laughter in the striped marquee, Arthur
clapped his hands continually and cried "Bravo!" But Ben had one admirer
whose eyes followed his movements with a fervid gravity that