At one end of the room, on a little raised platform, the music sat installed;—a trombone, a zither, and a wooden hackbrettle made up the whole orchestra. Scarcely had the performers struck up an enlivening tune when the men, selecting as partners the girls of their choice, began to dance round the hall in the very peculiar and (to say the whole truth) extremely ungraceful Tyrolean fashion. Will and Florian had heard from the landlord beforehand of the expected feast, to which they were not invited; but, “at the sound of the harp, sackbut, psaltery, and all kinds of music,” as Florian phrased it, their curiosity was so deeply aroused that they crept from their sitting-room and peeped cautiously in at the door of the _Tanzboden_. The sight that met their eyes in that close-packed hall was sufficiently striking. Even Florian allowed this was utterly Arcadian. For a minute or two, just at first, the young men and maidens, grasping each other wildly round the neck and waist with both their arms, in a sort of bear-like death-hug, whirled and eddied in a maze round and round the room, stamping their heavy boots, till Will almost trembled for the stability of the rafters. For some time that was all: they twisted and twirled in closely-coupled pairs, clasped breast to breast, like so many dancing dervishes. But, of a sudden, at a change of the music, as if by magic, with one accord, the whole figure altered. Each man, letting his partner go, began suddenly to perform a series of strange antics and evolutions around her, the relics of some pre-historic dance, of which the snapping of fingers and uttering of _heuchs_ in a Highland fling are but a faint and colourless reminiscence. As the reel went on, the music grew gradually faster and faster, and the motions of the men still more savage and fantastic. The two Englishmen looked on in astonishment and admiration. Such agility and such verve they had never before seen or even dreamt of. Could these rustic cavaliers be really made of india-rubber? They twisted and turned and contorted themselves all the time with such obliviousness of their bones, and such extraordinary energy! They smacked their lips and tongues as they went; they jumped high into the air; they bent back till their heads touched the ground behind; they bounded upright once more to regain their position like elastic puppets, and, in between whiles, they slapped their resounding thighs with their horny hands; they crowed like cocks; they whistled like capercailzie; they stamped on the ground with their hob-nailed shoes; they shouted and sang, and clicked their tongues in their cheeks, and made unearthly noises deep down in their throats for which language has as yet no articulate equivalent. Florian gazed and glowered. And well he might; ’twas an orgie of strange sound, a phantasmagoria of whirling and eddying motion.