There were other lines of stages within my recollection running to New Bedford, Middleboro and Bridgewater, with headquarters at Bradford’s and Randall’s taverns in which Oliver Harris, Theophilus Rickard and Henry Carter and others were employed as drivers. Mr. Carter, who drove the Bridge water stage some years, married in 1833, Maria Bartlett Banks, and for many years before his death he was the Plymouth station master of the Old Colony Railroad. Mr. Harris came from New Bedford and married in 1835 Ruth Rogers (Goddard) Fish, widow of Samuel Fish, and daughter of Benjamin Goddard of Plymouth. Our late townsmen, Capt. Wm. O. Harris and Christopher T. Harris, were his sons. The dancing school which I attended in the Plymouth Hotel, was kept by F. C. Schaffer in 1833 and 1834. There were no local dancing masters in those days, and professionals occupied the field, and as the lawyers say, followed the circuit. They would arrange schools in different towns for five afternoons and evenings in the week, and drive from one to another, reaching their homes on Saturday. There were other professionals who preceded and followed Mr. Schaffer, among whom were S. Whitney in 1828, and Lovet Stimson in 1830, who taught in Burbank’s hall on Middle street. At the rear end of the Burbank house, which stood immediately above the present house of Winslow S. Holmes, there was a two story projection, the lower part of which was occupied by Samuel Burbank’s bake house, above which was the hall in question. All I remember of the schools in that hall is that on the closing night of the term in one or the other, when pupils were permitted to dance until twelve o’clock, and invite their friends, a terrific thunder storm set in before midnight with heavy rain and fearful lightning, which continued so that pupils and parents, my mother with the rest, were unable to reach home until the small hours of the morning. In those days it was the fashion for women to wear as stiffeners in their corsets busks made of wood or whalebone or steel, and doubtless on that as on similar occasions, those who wore steel drew them deftly from their waists, and put them where the lightning would fail to find them. While Danville Bryant was keeping the Pilgrim House, men more or less generally adopted the fashion of wearing skin tight trousers spreading closely over the instep and fastened with a strap under the foot. The most conspicuous persons in Plymouth to adopt this fashion were Mr. Bryant and Capt. Simeon Dike. Of course the trousers and boots had to be put on and off together, thus making the fashion too troublesome to last, and by a process of evolution the cloth or leather gaiters followed. It is as true in dress as in other things that one extreme follows another, and so the next fashion for men was for loose trousers with full plaited or gathered bodies.