In the middle of the evening, while they were yet fresh, she and Elisha danced the "hoe-down." All the others crowded back against the walls, leaving the middle of the room clear, and she and her partner took their places. They were the best dancers in the settlement, and Beaver Cove could boast of some as good as any in all north Georgia. The music struck up, and the two young people began slowly to shuffle their feet, advancing toward each other, then retreating. They moved at first without enthusiasm, gravely and coolly. The music quickened, and their steps with it. Now together, now separate, up and down the room, face to face, advancing, receding, always in that sliding, shuffling step. The girl’s face flushed; her lithe figure, clothed in the most primitively fashioned blue print gown, swayed and curved in a thousand graceful movements; her feet, shod in clumsy brogans, moved so swiftly one could scarcely follow them; her yellow hair slipped from its fastenings and fell about her neck and shoulders; her bosom heaved and palpitated. Panting and breathless, Elisha dropped into a seat, his defeat greeted with jeering laughter by the crowd, while Armindy kept the floor. It was a wild, half-savage dance, and my pen refuses to describe it. Nowhere, except in the mountains of north Georgia, have I ever witnessed such a strange performance. Armindy would not stop until, half-blind and reeling with exhaustion, she darted toward the door, amid the applause of the crowd. Elisha Cole started up to follow her, but Ephraim Hurd reached her side first, and went out into the yard with her. "You’ve nearly killed yourself," he said, half-roughly, half-tenderly. "No such a thing!" she retorted. "You’re out o’ breath now." "I want some water." "Better sit down on this bench and rest a minute first," he said, attempting to lead her to a seat placed under an apple-tree; but she broke away from him, running swiftly toward the spring bubbling up from a thicket of laurel just beyond the dooryard fence. "I ain’t no baby, Eph’um Hurd!" she cried, gathering up her hair and winding it about her head again, the breeze fanning her flushed cheeks. The moon was clear and full over Brandreth’s Peak, and Ephraim looked up at it, then down on the girl, softened, etherealized by its magic beams. "What makes you act so, Armindy?" She broke a spray of laurel bloom and thrust it through the coil of her hair. "I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, Eph’um; but I do know I’m waitin’ for you to give me that gourd o’ water." He sighed, stooped, and filled the gourd to the brim, and gave it to her. She drank deeply, then threw the remainder out in a glittering shower, and dropped the gourd into the spring. "Don’t go to the house yet," he pleaded, as she turned away. "I’m tired." "An’ I—I am—you don’t keer anything for ’Lishy, do you? Armindy, do you recollect what you said the last time we went to the singin’ at Rock Creek?"