a type as old as the fabled Endymion.

His long brown hair hung in heavy curls to the collar of his butternut
jeans coat; his eyes were blue and large and finely set; his face was
fair and bespoke none of the midday toil at the plow-handles that
had tanned the complexion of his compeers, for Brent Kayle had little
affinity for labor of any sort. He danced with a light firm step, every
muscle supplely responsive to the strongly marked pulse of the music,
and he had a lithe, erect carriage which imparted a certain picturesque
effect to his presence, despite his much creased boots, drawn over his
trousers to the knee, and his big black hat which he wore on the back of
his head. The face of his partner had a more subtle appeal, and so light
and willowy was her figure as she danced that it suggested a degree of
slenderness that bordered on attenuation. Her unbonneted hair of a rich
blonde hue had a golden lustre in the sun; her complexion was of an
exquisite whiteness and with a delicate flush; the chiseling of her
features was peculiarly fine, in clear, sharp lines--she was called
"hatchet-faced" by her undiscriminating friends. She wore a coarse,
flimsy, pink muslin dress which showed a repetitious pattern of vague
green leaves, and as she flitted, lissome and swaying, through the
throng, with the wind a-flutter in her full draperies, she might have
suggested to a spectator the semblance of a pink flower--of the humbler
varieties, perhaps, but still a wild rose is a rose.

Even the longest dance must have an end; even the stanchest mountain
fiddler will reach at last his limit of endurance and must needs be
refreshed and fed. There was a sudden significant flourish of frisky
bowing, now up and again down, enlisting every resonant capacity of
horsehair and catgut; the violins quavered to a final long-drawn scrape
and silence descended. Dullness ensued; the flavor of the day seemed to
pall; the dancers scattered and were presently following the crowd that
began to slowly gather about the vacated stand of the musicians, from
which elevation the speakers of the occasion were about to address their
fellow-citizens. One of the disaffected old farmers, gruff and averse,
could not refrain from administering a rebuke to Brent Kayle as crossing
the expanse of saw-dust on his way to join the audience he encountered
the youth in company with Valeria Clee, his recent partner.

"Ai-yi, Brent," the old man said, "the last time I seen