er to secure vigorous and concerted action at the polls in the
luke-warm rural districts when these measures should go before the
people, in the person of their advocates, at the approaching primary
elections. However, even the wisdom of a political boss is not
infallible, and despite the succulent graces of the barbecue numbers of
the ascetic and jeans-clad elder worthies, though fed to repletion,
collogued unhappily together among the ox-teams and canvas-hooded wagons
on the slope, commenting sourly on the frivolity of the dance. These
might be relied on to cast no ballots in the interest of its promoters,
with whose views they were to be favored between the close of the feast
and the final dance before sunset.

The trees waved full-foliaged branches above the circle of sawdust and
dappled the sunny expanse with flickering shade, and as they swayed
apart in the wind they gave evanescent glimpses of tiers on tiers of the
faint blue mountains of the Great Smoky Range in the distance, seeming
ethereal, luminous, seen from between the dark, steep, wooded slopes of
the narrow water-gap hard by, through which Headlong Creek plunged and
roared. The principal musician, perched with his fellows on a hastily
erected stand, was burly, red-faced, and of a jovial aspect. He had a
brace of fiddlers, one on each side, but with his own violin under his
double-chin he alone "called the figures" of the old-fashioned
contradances. Now and again, with a wide, melodious, sonorous voice, he
burst into a snatch of song:

"Shanghai chicken he grew so tall,
In a few days--few days,
Cannot hear him crow at all----"

Sometimes he would intersperse jocund personal remarks in his
Terpsichorean commands: "Gents, forward to the centre--back--swing the
lady ye love the best." Then in alternation, "Ladies, forward to the
centre--back----" and as the mountain damsels teetered in expectation of
the usual supplement of this mandate he called out in apparent
expostulation, "_Don't_ swing him, Miss--he don't wuth a turn."

Suddenly the tune changed and with great gusto he chanted forth:

"When fust I did a-courtin' go,
Says she 'Now, _don't_ be foolish, Joe,'"

the _tempo rubato_ giving fresh impetus to the kaleidoscopic whirl of
the dancers. The young men were of indomitable endurance and manifested
a crude agility as they sprang about clumsily in time to the scraping of
the fiddles, while their partners shuffled bouncingly o