The modern revival of morris-dancing in England is of very recent origin, but of astonishingly rapid growth. The story of its rise reads like a romance. This movement, which is already national in its scope, which promises to renew the heart of England, which is swelling out into wider circles that will probably be felt throughout the Empire and America, was born in a girls’ club in a poor quarter of the north-west of London. The object of the Espérance Girls’ Club in Cumberland Market was to bring something of the joyous and serene atmosphere of a younger and fresher world into the grim and hurried life of the city dwellers. For some time one of the features of the club had been the encouragement of music, dancing and play-acting. During some winters Scotch reels and strathspeys, Irish jigs and folk-songs, had been practised one night a week. A meeting between Mr H. C. MacIlwaine, the musical director of the club, and Mr Cecil Sharp, the leading authority on folk-music, led to the introduction of the English folk-song. From the folk-song to the folk-dance was only a step. Mr Sharp seven years before had collected a set of morris-tunes from some dancers in Oxfordshire, in whose family the Morris had been handed down from father to son for five generations. The idea suggested itself that as the girls had learnt to sing the old songs they might also learn to dance the old dances. In October 1905 Miss Mary Neal, the secretary of the club, who has throughout been the directing spirit of the movement, went down to Oxfordshire and brought two of the morris-men up to London, and set them to teach the members of the club. The success of the experiment was immediate and astonishing. The girls were as unfamiliar with the steps and the music as with the speech and dances of ancient Greece; but perhaps a kind of ancestral memory awoke within them. The rhythms of the Morris had sprung from the rhythms of the old English life, and the Londoners, who are said to be never more than three generations from the soil, responded to a summons of the blood. Within half-an-hour of the coming of the Oxfordshire dancers the Morris, with its stamping of feet and clashing of staves, its maze of intricate movements, was in full swing upon a London floor. Thus was begun the revival of morris-dancing which to-day is a part of the national life. The next step was the giving of a public concert to make known to the larger world the rediscovery of the ancient dances. This took place at the Small Queen’s Hall in the following April. The public interest was immediately aroused. As one of the newspapers remarked with prophetic insight, it was “a little entertainment which may indeed light such a candle in England as will not immediately be put out.”