“‘Dance now?’” he repeated. “Sho! Samantha, you couldn’t dance nowadays if you was to try.” “Who says I couldn’t?” asked Samantha, again, with a set look developing around the corners of her mouth. “_I_ say you couldn’t,” replied Mr. Pett, obtusely. “’Tain’t in nature. But there was a time, Samantha, when you was great on fancy steps.” “Think I’m too old for fancy steps now, do you?” She looked at her tormentor savagely, out of the corners of her eyes. “Well, not too old, may be, Samantha,” went on Mr. Pett; “but may be you ain’t that limber you was. I know how it is. I ain’t smart as I used to be, myself. Why, do you remember that night down at the Corners, when we two was the only ones that could jump over Squire Tate’s high andirons and cut a pigeon-wing before we come down?” Mr. Pett appeared to be entirely unconscious that Mrs. Spaulding’s bosom was heaving, that her eyes were snapping angrily, and that her foot was beating on the floor in that tattoo with which a woman announces that she is near an end of her patience. “How high was them andirons?” she asked, breathlessly. “Oh, I don’t know,” answered Reuben, indifferently. He kept his eyes fixed on his work; but while he worked his splice closer with his right hand, with his left he took off his hat and held it out rather more than two feet above the floor. “’Bout as high as that, may be,” he said. “Remember the tune we done that to? Went some sort of way like this, didn’t it?” And with that remarkable force of talent which is only developed in country solitudes, Mr. Pett began to whistle an old-time air, a jiggetty, wiggetty whirl-around strain born of some dead darkey’s sea-sawing fiddle-bow, with a volume of sustained sound that would have put to shame anything the saw-mill could have done for itself in its buzzingest days. “Whee-ee-ee, ee-ee, ee ee ee, whee, ee, ee, ee _ee_!” whistled Mr. Pett; and then, softly, and as if only the dim stirring of memory moved him, he began to call the old figures of the old dance. “Forward all!” he crooned. “Turn partners! Sashay! Alleman’ all! Whee-ee-ee, ee-ee, ee ee, ee ee ee, whee, ee, ee, ee, ee, ee _ee_!” And suddenly, like the tiger leaping from her lair, the soft pattering and shuffling of feet behind him resolved itself into a quick, furious rhythmic beat, and Samantha Spaulding shot high into the air, holding up her skirts with both hands, while her neat ankles crossed each other in a marvelous complication of agility a good twelve inches above his outstretched hat. “There!” she cried, as she landed with a flourish that combined skill and grace; “there’s what I done with you, and much I think of it! If you want to see dancin’ that is dancin’ look here. Here’s what I did with Ben Griggs at the shuckin’ that same year; and you wa’n’t there, and good reason why!”