er about the new cooeperative scheme
in Barre, Vermont.

"For the love o' Mike!" my friend repeated. "That ain't a band; it's a
historical s'ciety. Dead and buried! Next they'll strike up that latest
novelty rage, 'In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree!'--Now will you listen
to that. Robbin' the cemetery!"

He needn't have asked me to listen. As a matter of fact I had been
listening for perhaps a hundred seconds; listening, not as if with the
ears, but with the deeper sensatory nerves. And without consciously
grasping what the air was I had suffered an abrupt voyage through space.
I saw a torch-lit sward, ringed with blue and saffron faces and high
forest walls; I saw the half-nude, golden loveliness of a Polynesian
woman shaken like a windy leaf. And the beat of a goat-hide drum was the
beat of my blood. I felt my shoulders swaying.

I looked at the young man. His face expressed a facetious weariness, but
his shoulders, too, were swaying.

"What tune is that?" I asked, in a level tone.

His contemptuous amazement was unfeigned.

"Holy Moses! man. Where you been?"

He squinted at me. After all, I might be "stringing him."

"That," he said, "is as old as Adam. It was run to death so long ago I
can't remember. That? That's 'Paragon Park.' That is the old original
first 'Shimmie' dance--with whiskers two foot long--"

"The original what?"

"Shimmie! _Shimmie!_ Say, honest to God, don't you know--?" And with his
shoulders he made a wriggling gesture in appeal to my wits, the crudest
burlesque, it seemed, of a divinely abominable gesture in my
memory.--"That?" he queried. "Eh?"

"Shimmie," I echoed, and, my mind skipping back: "_Shemdance! Shame
Dance!_--I see!"

"Why?" he demanded, intrigued by my preoccupation.

"Nothing. It just reminded me of something."

Then he lifted a hand and smote himself on the thigh. "Me, too! By
jinks! Say, I'd almost forgot that."

He hitched his chair upon me; held me down with a forefinger.

"Listen. That was funny. It was one night--last fall. It was just after
Number Seventeen had pulled out, westbound, about one-forty in the
morning. There wasn't anything else till six-one. Them are always the
hardest hours. A fellow's got to stay awake, see, and nothin' to keep
him--unless maybe a coyote howlin' a mile off, or maybe a bum knockin'
around among the box cars on the sidin', or, if it's cold, the stove to
tend. That's all. Unless you put a record on the old phonograph and hit