e the British nation deems worthy
of the name of sport any exercise which is at once useless, tiring
and dangerous, I am quite ready to admit that dancing answers this
definition in every way. Nevertheless, among savages----"

"Aurelle, my boy, don't talk to me about savages!" said Parker.
"You've never been out of your beloved Europe. Now I have lived among
the natives of Australia and Malay; and their dances were not
sentimental pantomimes, as you call them, at all, but warlike
exercises for their young soldiers, that took the place of our
Swedish drill and bayonet practice. Besides, it is not so very long
since these close embraces were adopted in our own countries. Your
minuets and pavanes were respecters of persons, and the ancients, who
liked looking at dancing girls, never stooped to twirling them
round."

"That's quite easy to understand," put in the doctor. "What did they
want with dancing? The directness of their customs made such
artificial devices for personal contact quite unnecessary. It's only
our Victorian austerity which makes these rhythmical embraces so
attractive. Puritan America loves to waggle her hips, and----"

"Doctor," said the general, "turn the record over, will you, and put
on speed eighty; it's a jazz."

"What's worrying me," began Aurelle, who had returned once more to
his paper, "is that our oracles are taking the theory of nationality
so seriously. A nation is a living organism, but a nationality is
nothing. Take the Jugo-Slavs, for instance----"

At that moment the doctor produced such an ear-splitting racket from
the gramophone that the interpreter let his _Times_ fall to the
ground.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed; "have you broken it, doctor?"

"Broken it?" repeated the doctor in mild surprise.

"You don't mean to tell me that all that noise of broken crockery and
foghorns was deliberately put together by a human brain?"

"You know nothing about it," said the doctor. "This negro music is
excellent stuff. Negroes are much finer artists than we are; they
alone can still feel the holy delirium which ranked the first singers
among the gods...."

His voice was drowned by the sinister racket of the jazz, which made
a noise like a barrage of 4.2 howitzers in a thunderstorm.

"Jazz!" shouted the general to his aide-de-camp, bostoning
majestically the while. "Jazz--Dundas, what _is_ jazz?"

"Anything you like, sir," replied the rosy-cheeked one. "You've just
got to follow the music."