, 1888-09-11
AN OLD TIME HOE DOWN y
A Country Party in Canada In the Days
of Long Ago.

a Country Party in Canada in the Days
of Long Ago.
Did you ever get a ''bid" to a dance in
the country2 1 mean a real, home made,
fifth concessions, log house, quarter of a
century back country party. A spree, a
hoe down, a neighborhood shaker of the
simple, ready, rough, pioneer days. Did,
eh2 hen you will remember that on the
morning of the day fixed for the party
the board partition that ran across the
middle of the house was pulled down, and
the beds were piled in one corner, and
the bunk was showed up to the end of the
house beside the stove, and the stout
legged kitchen table was placed against
the wall at the other end of the room, and
a stout legged chair planted on the table,
and to that chair the fiddler was elevated,
m there he rolled his gray old head
from side to side, and whisked lightning
from his elbow and fingered in e~cstatic
frenzy and beat time with his cowhide
boots, n the throb of his eager music
touched the very inner keys of life and
stirred the young blood and softened the
hardening muscles and loosed the settled
joints of age until the stove shook and
the dishes ratified on the shelves and the
beat of the feet on the dancing floor was
ANS "fS SAaoilAlAS Vi q VI hlillClor
deadened as by the sweep of a mighty
broom between
How they dancedl How the fellow
who had a few steps shone and capered
and pounded the floor with his cowhidesl
And how they swung! Round and round,
and round and round, until the perspira-
ton rolled down the face and the breath
gasped for a renewal of the lease. Tanned
and degenerate days. They swing no
more. And they dance no more. The
mighty clatter of the old Scotch reel
where old people unlimbered and shook
off the steps of youth, and the young
people gasped to keep pace with the
elders; and the opera reel-they called
it the upper reel-which the old folks
also invaded; and then the cutting out
jig, where the youths one after the
other did their finest steps, and the girls
did the same, and you often got on the
track of a liking or an incipient COM
pany keeping by noting h time and
circumstances under which some par
ticular girl selected to take the floor, and
who thus became the partner of her
choice, and the same with the male end
of the performance, where the cut out
was much more likely to nave a signif-
canoe.
Do you remember that as a boy you
felt if you could grow up to call off
dances, or perhaps call off and play the
fiddle at the same time, as you once
knew q man do, and whose image lived
IN your memory for weeks, that clerking
in a store or even teaching school would
be nowhere: or perhaps you know a clerk
who kept store and could call off also,
and you ached to grow up and be as
great a man as he? 1t is hardly likely
you knew a male teacher who could
dance much. Somehow the worry in
the teachers head over arithmetical
problems and the confusion of dates and
the eccentricities of parsing seemed to
get into the teachers feet when he got
on the floor, or, as n native used to put
it in a place where l once lived, his left
foot was Methodist and mixed him up
and disgraced him every time he man
aged to get for a partner n stranger who
hadn't been told how badly he danced.
1t seems singular now, when you think
of it, that the best dancers among the
boys were wo~odchoppers and farmers and
farm hands, while the best among the
girls were the daughters of hotel keepers
and village merchants, and very often the
village teacher was q mighty spry little
thing IN her feet, for the reason that she
was almost always such a great ~faYorite
of the dancers of the other persuasion
that she couldn't avoid holding the floor,
and was a dancer in spite of herself.
The dances were usually kept up until A
or even 8 o'clock in the morning, and
were then closed with a s~tupendous
breakfast, followed by an effort to get a
collection for the fiddler. And these
pioneer fiddlers were sh~ockingly under
paid, Very often they were not paid at
all. They had the gratitude and the APP
probation of the time in which they lived.
But no more. They fiddled through two
generations, but the second did for them
little better than the first, and they passed
down to the grave miserably poor
Toronto Globe.