Why, in this age of revivals, when we fill our rooms with Chippendale furniture and rococo mirrors and inlaid Florentine cabinets, and use the subdued colours of our grandmothers, when our books are printed in old type with head and tail pieces of two centuries ago, when the edges are left in the rough--why should we allow the waltz, the foreign waltz, to monopolize our ball-rooms to the exclusion of all beautiful figure-dancing, and let an old English art disappear completely without an attempt to recover it? It will be in these delightful, graceful, old national dances that our girls will, like the daughter of Philipater in the _Spectator_, dance themselves into our esteem, as it is pretty sure that in the approved fashion of waltzing they will dance themselves out of it. [Illustration] CHAPTER VIII. OLD ROADS. [Illustration] Practical inconvenience attends living at the junction of the Is-not and the Is. To make myself better understood, I must explain. On October 11th, 1809, Colonel Mudge published the Ordnance Survey of the county which I grace with my presence. In that map he entered a _Proposed Road_, running about four miles from N. to S. through my property, and in front of my house. I was not alive at the time, so the expression "my house" is inexact, it was the house of my grandfather. This proposed road was to be a main artery of traffic, and a county road,--but it was never carried out. To carry it out would have been inconvenient, as the walled garden of the house, with very good jargonelle and Bon-chrétien pears lies athwart the proposed course, and an ancient black fig-tree that produces abundantly every year grows precisely on the site of the proposed road. I presume that my grandfather raised objections. Anyhow the road was never made. However, since the survey of 1809, map-makers--convinced that what was then proposed has been in effect carried out--have systematically entered this road as an accomplished fact. Now perhaps the reader can understand what it is to live on the point of junction of the Is and Is-not. The road indicated on the maps _is not_ in existence, and yet the public consider, on the authority of the maps, that it _is_.