Dancing was an additional available attainment of the age--so highly coveted that the acquirement was often prosecuted under what might have appeared insurmountable obstacles. The poor notable wives of impecunious lairds dispensed with expensive dancing-masters, and taught their children to dance the intricate country-dances of the day by means of chairs set up in rows.[6] Lord Campbell, after he was a distinguished, hard-working lawyer, went under an assumed name to an evening dancing-school. Dr. Norman Macleod’s aunts were supposed to have acquired dancing from an enterprising little governess, heavily weighted with a wooden leg. Primrose was bent on refining and perfecting Peggy’s dancing. She would make feints of practising her own steps and of longing for a country-dance till she coaxed Peggy to stand up with her at the head of a double row of chairs. Balcairnie, who could go oftener to Drumsheugh now that Miss Ramsay was there, caught the two girls in the middle of such a performance. Primrose with long-winded assiduity was singing the tune of ‘The White Cockade,’ in addition to taking her part in the dance. Peggy was slightly holding out her gown as she was bidden, and sliding bashfully, yet not without a certain natural grace, down the room at the backs of the chairs. No gazer could have been more imbued with keen pleasure and humble admiration, but, like Actæon, he had to pay a penalty for his rash gazing. He was compelled by the autocrat Primrose to join in dancing a ‘three-some reel,’ performed to his whistling instead of her singing, while the last rays of the setting sun were yet gilding the pear-tree round the western window of the Drumsheugh drawing-room. When he was brought to the point he did his duty gallantly, not withholding a single spring, shuffle or ‘hough!’ which was Primrose’s due, but capering his best, with the serious face which most English and Scotchmen put on to qualify their gambols. It might be some consolation for the effort of the exhibition to hear a judge and mistress of the art like Primrose say graciously after the deed was done, ‘Well danced, sir. I have often heard that there were no reels to be seen far or near like those danced by you and Drumsheugh and my cousin Peggy here, and now, though I am a poor substitute for the laird, I know what the folk said was true.’