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Mary Kyley, whose gay heart responded readily to the conviviality of her guests, danced at these times, contesting in breathless jigs and reels, displaying amazing agility and a sort of barbaric frenzy, while the men yelled encouragement and applause, the pannikins circulated, and the smoke gathered in a cloud along the ridge-pole.
Then she fell to mumbling and reciting jigs of verse, quaint measures; and she pored along the sand to where a line had been drawn, and saw that the footprints of the youth were traced along it.
But when the windows were up, I heard him singin' them jigs and reels, and I expectin' every minut to see the men, women, and bairns a dancin'". "They sit perfectly still, while he is singing", said Adèle, "and listen as intently as if they heard an angel. His voice is sometimes like a flute, sometimes like a trumpet. Did you hear the words he sang?"
Madam can write a farce, or even a solution to an enigma, with as little labour as any lady in the land; and her dear Mr. Whiffle-Wit can set them both to music, with no less facility and genius! Nothing can equal them, except his own jigs on the organ!
It was Pitzela's son's son and he was a man almost 70 years old. And it was a scandal at the funeral. Why? Because Pitzela laughed and coming back from the grave he said: 'Look at me, my grandson dies and I go to his funeral and if he had a son I would go to his, too, and I would dance jigs both times." A dark afternoon with summer thunder in the sky.
"If I do," whispered Mark. "You will, sir," said the man, confidently. "Give four jigs, and up we come. Got your dirk?" "Yes." "Draw it, sir; hold it in your teeth, to leave your hands free, and if any one comes at you use it. That thing can't kill." Mark drew a deep breath, thrust himself half out of the window, turned, and gazed up.
"Dancing was the principal amusement of our young people of both sexes. Their dances, to be sure, were of the simplest form. Three and four-handed reels and jigs. Country dances, cotillions, and minuets, were unknown. I remember to have seen, once or twice, a dance which was called 'The Irish Trot, but I have long since forgotten its figure."
But I fancy a people who would give an "ordination ball" would not long sit still at a wedding; and by the year 1769, at a wedding in New London, ninety-two jigs, fifty contra-dances, forty-three minuets, and seventeen hornpipes were danced, and the party broke up at quarter of one in the morning at what time could it have begun?
McClure was persuaded to bring out his violin once more it had been long silent and he began playing the liveliest of tunes, strathspeys, jigs, and reels, until some of the men could hardly keep their heels still, but it is hard to dance on loose sand, and they had to be contented with expressing their feelings in song.
Presently the natives drew off to a fire by themselves, where there would be no white-man's restraint. They had either begged or stolen traders' rum, and after the hard trip from Ste. Anne, were eager for one of their mad boissons a drinking-bout interspersed with jigs and fights.
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