rs.
Sykes.

One result of the parties was that Mr. Ketchum, going over to Mr. Brown's
one morning, found all the young people assembled there practising steps,
the "two-and-a-half," the "polka-glide," and other cheerful evolutions.
After watching Mr. Ramsay's efforts to do as Bijou did, for a moment, he
called out to her to know what she was doing to a British subject under
his protection, and, being shown by Bijou (skirts held up a little, the
prettiest feet imaginable, daintily shod, and the gliding, swaying,
pirouetting, galopading, graceful beyond expression), cried out, "Teaching
him to dance, are you? I thought he was practising heading off a calf in a
lane." This so exactly expressed the awkward desperate plunges to the
right and left which Mr. Ramsay was executing at the moment, that Mr.
Heathcote had another of his acute attacks of appreciation, and became
almost a subject for sal volatile and burnt feathers, Mr. Ramsay saying
good-naturedly, "What a fellow you are for chaffin', Ketchum! Just you
hook it out of this, will you, and let us get on with this? One and two
and a kick, you say, Miss Brown? I am such a duffer I can't get the kick."

"You do the one and two make one, and leave the kick to Miss Bijou," said
Mr. Ketchum suggestively. "Why aren't you gambolling like the playful
antelope, Heathcote?"

"I don't often gamble. I leave that to Ramsay, who is an all-fired
jewhillikens scratch at it, as you say over here," replied Mr.
Heathcote.

"You gamble a little differently, that is all. You have dropped a good
deal on loo first and last, for all your wisdom," retorted Mr. Ramsay
between his steps.

"Get out your 'Hand-Book of American Slang,' my boy,--two dollars a volume,
--and you will retrieve all your losses, I'll engage," said Mr. Ketchum
laughingly, as he walked away.

The dancing had been interrupted, however, and Bijou and Mr. Ramsay
retired to the bow-window to talk. "Odd that I can't get it, isn't it?"
said he. "I never was much of a dancin' man; and I ought to be, you know.
I am not a readin' man; and a man that is not a readin' man is nearly
always a dancin' man. The governor is a readin' man, and took a
double-first; but I am like my poor mother, who was dull." Thus launched,
he gave her a full account of his relatives and home with all his own
frankness, and she, listening with her heart as well as her ears, did not
know whether to smile or sigh: the phraseology of the recital and its