at might have shot a pang of jealousy
through the heart of Neil Gow himself. The noise that instantly
commenced, and was kept up from that moment, with but few intervals,
during the whole evening, was of a kind that is never heard in
fashionable drawing-rooms. Dancing in the backwood settlements _is_
dancing. It is not walking; it is not sailing; it is not undulating; it
is not sliding; no, it is _bona-fide_ dancing! It is the performance of
intricate evolutions with the feet and legs that makes one wink to look
at; performed in good time too, and by people who look upon _all_ their
muscles as being useful machines, not merely things of which a select
few, that cannot be dispensed with, are brought into daily operation.
Consequently the thing was done with an amount of vigour that was
conducive to the health of performers, and productive of satisfaction to
the eyes of beholders. When the evening wore on apace, however, and
Jacques's modesty was so far overcome as to induce him to engage in a
reel, along with his friend Louis Peltier, and two bouncing young ladies
whose father had driven them twenty miles over the plains that day in
order to attend the wedding of their dear friend and former playmate,
Kate--when these four stood up, we say, and the fiddler played more
energetically than ever, and the stout backwoodsmen began to warm and
grow vigorous, until, in the midst of their tremendous leaps and rapid
but well-timed motions, they looked like very giants amid their
brethren, then it was that Harry, as he felt Kate's little hand pressing
his arm, and observed her sparkling eyes gazing at the dancers in
genuine admiration, began at last firmly to believe that the whole thing
was a dream; and then it was that old Mr Kennedy rejoiced to think that
the house had been built under his own special directions, and he knew
that it could not by any possibility be shaken to pieces.

And well might Harry imagine that he dreamed; for besides the
bewildering tendency of the almost too-good-to-be-true fact that Kate
was really Mrs Harry Somerville, the scene before him was a
particularly odd and perplexing mixture of widely different elements,
suggestive of new and old associations. The company was miscellaneous.
There were retired old traders, whose lives from boyhood had been spent
in danger, solitude, wild scenes, and adventures to which those of
Robinson Crusoe are mere child's play. There were young girls, the
daughters