e summer evening to call upon her. The Hogarths were living a little
way out of London, in a residence which had a drawing-room opening with
French windows on to a lawn. In this room my mother and her family were
seated quietly after dinner on this particular evening, when suddenly a
young sailor jumped through one of the open windows into the apartment,
whistled and danced a hornpipe, and before they could recover from their
amazement jumped out again. A few minutes later my father walked in at
the door as sedately as though quite innocent of the prank, and shook
hands with everyone; but the sight of their amazed faces proving too much
for his attempted sobriety, his hearty laugh was the signal for the rest
of the party to join in his merriment. But judging from his slight
ability in later years, I fancy that he must have taken many lessons to
secure his perfection in that hornpipe.

His dancing was at its best, I think, in the "Sir Roger de Coverly"--and
in what are known as country dances. In the former, while the end
couples are dancing, and the side couples are supposed to be still, my
father would insist upon the sides keeping up a kind of jig step, and
clapping his hands to add to the fun, and dancing at the backs of those
whose enthusiasm he thought needed rousing, was himself never still for a
moment until the dance was over. He was very fond of a country dance
which he learned at the house of some dear friends at Rockingham Castle,
which began with quite a stately minuet to the tune of "God save the
Queen," and then dashed suddenly into "Down the Middle and up Again."
His enthusiasm in this dance, I remember, was so great that, one evening
after some of our Tavistock House theatricals, when I was thoroughly worn
out with fatigue, being selected by him as his partner, I caught the
infection of his merriment, and my weariness vanished. As he himself
says, in describing dear old "Fezziwig's" Christmas party, we were
"people who would dance and had no notion of walking." His enjoyment of
all our frolics was equally keen, and he writes to an American friend, _a
propos_ of one of our Christmas merry-makings: "Forster is out again; and
if he don't go in again after the manner in which we have been keeping
Christmas, he must be very strong indeed. Such dinings, such conjurings,
such blindman's buffings, such theatre goings, such kissings out of old
years and kissings in of new ones never took place in these par