n the dreaming air,
With elegance and grace to spare.
Vive! vive la valse, la valse legere!

--_George Jessop_.

III

THERE ARE CORNS IN EGYPT

Our civilization--wise child!--knows its father in the superior
civilization whose colossal vestiges are found along the Nile. To those,
then, who see in the dance a civilizing art, it can not be wholly
unprofitable to glance at this polite accomplishment as it existed among
the ancient Egyptians, and was by them transmitted--with various
modifications, but preserving its essentials of identity--to other
nations and other times. And here we have first to note that, as in all
the nations of antiquity, the dance in Egypt was principally a religious
ceremony; the pious old boys that builded the pyramids executed their
jigs as an act of worship. Diodorus Siculus informs us that Osiris, in
his proselyting travels among the peoples surrounding Egypt--for Osiris
was what we would call a circuit preacher--was accompanied by dancers
male and dancers female. From the sculptures on some of the oldest tombs
of Thebes it is seen that the dances there depicted did not greatly
differ from those in present favor in the same region; although it seems
a fair inference from the higher culture and refinement of the elder
period that they were distinguished by graces correspondingly superior.
That dances having the character of religious rites were not always free
from an element that we would term indelicacy, but which their
performers and witnesses probably considered the commendable exuberance
of zeal and devotion, is manifest from the following passage of
Herodotus, in which reference is made to the festival of Bubastis:

Men and women come sailing all together, vast numbers in each boat,
many of the women with castanets, which they strike, while some of
the men pipe during the whole period of the voyage; the remainder of
the voyagers, male and female, sing the while, and make a clapping
with their hands. When they arrive opposite to any town on the banks
of the stream they approach the shore, and while some of the women
continue to play and sing, others call aloud to the females of the
place and load them with abuse, a certain number dancing and others
standing up, uncovering themselves. Proceeding in this way all along
the river course they reach Bubastis, where they celebrate the feast
with abundant sacrifice.

Of the m