Been to the West, I've Been
to the Jay-Bird's Altar_; and _Skip-to-My-Lou_; and _The Juniper Tree_;
and _Go In and Out the Window_; and _The Jolly Old Miller_; and _Captain
Jinks_; and lots more of them. Boyds and Burnses and Smythes tripping
the light fantastic with them, and not half a dozen dresses better than
alpacas in the crowd, and the men many of them in drilling trousers--and
half of them with hayseed in their hair from the load on which they rode
to the party! So, ye Iowa aristocracy, put that in your pipes and smoke
it, as ye bowl over the country in your automobiles--or your airships,
as I suppose it may be before you read this!

I went round with the rest of them, for I had seen all these plays on
the canal boats, and had once or twice taken part in them. Kittie
Fleming, very graceful and gracious as she bowed to me, and as I swung
her around, was my partner. Bob Wade still devoted himself to Virginia,
who was like a fairy in her fine pink silk dress.

"This is enough of these plays," shouted Bob at last, after looking
about to see that his father and mother were not in the room. "Let's
have the 'Needle's Eye'!"

"The 'Needle's Eye'!" was the cry, then.

"I won't play kissing games!" said one or two of the girls.

"Le's have 'The Gay Balonza Man'!" shouted Doctor Bliven, who was in
the midst of the gaieties, while his wife too, plunged in as if to
outdo him.

"Oh, yes!" she said, smiling up into the face of Frank Finster, with
whom she had been playing. "Let's have 'The Gay Balonza Man!' It's
such fun[13]!"

[13] One here discovers a curious link between our recent past and olden
times in our Old Home, England. This game has like most of the kissing
or play-party games of our fathers (and mothers) more than one version.
By some it was called "The Gay Galoney Man," by others "The Gay Balonza
Man." It is a last vestige of the customs of the sixteenth century and
earlier in England. It was brought over by our ancestors, and survived
in Iowa at the time of its settlement, and probably persists still in
remote localities settled by British immigrants. The "Gay Balonza Man"
must be the character--the traveling beggar, pedler or tinker,--who was
the hero of country-side people, and of the poem attributed to James V.
called _The Gaberlunzie-Man_ (1512-1542) in which the event is summed up
in two lines relating to a peasant girl, "She's aff wi the
gaberlunzie-man." The words of the play run in part as follow