He let me know somewhere in the give-and-take of talk that he was a railway telegraph operator, and that, given his first long vacation, an old impulse, come down from the days of the Hawaiian _hula_ phonograph records, had brought him to the isle of delight. He was disappointed in it. One could see in his candid eyes that he felt himself done out of an illusion, an illusion of continuous dancing by girls in rope skirts on moonlit beaches. It was an intolerable waste of money. Here, come so far and so expensively to the romantic goal, he was disturbed to find his imagination fleeing back to the incredible adventure of a Rock Island station, an iron-red dot on the bald, high plain of eastern Colorado--to the blind sun flare of the desert--to the immensity of loneliness--to the thundering nightly crisis of the "Eleven-ten," sweeping monstrous and one-eyed out of the cavern of the West, grating, halting, glittering, gossiping, yawning, drinking with a rush and gurgle from the red tank--and on again with an abrupt and always startling clangor into the remote night of the East. He shifted impatiently in his chair and made a dreary face at the screening fronds. "For the love o' Mike! Even the rags they play here are old." The consumptive was telling the banker about the new cooeperative scheme in Barre, Vermont. "For the love o' Mike!" my friend repeated. "That ain't a band; it's a historical s'ciety. Dead and buried! Next they'll strike up that latest novelty rage, 'In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree!'--Now will you listen to that. Robbin' the cemetery!" He needn't have asked me to listen. As a matter of fact I had been listening for perhaps a hundred seconds; listening, not as if with the ears, but with the deeper sensatory nerves. And without consciously grasping what the air was I had suffered an abrupt voyage through space. I saw a torch-lit sward, ringed with blue and saffron faces and high forest walls; I saw the half-nude, golden loveliness of a Polynesian woman shaken like a windy leaf. And the beat of a goat-hide drum was the beat of my blood. I felt my shoulders swaying. I looked at the young man. His face expressed a facetious weariness, but his shoulders, too, were swaying. "What tune is that?" I asked, in a level tone. His contemptuous amazement was unfeigned. "Holy Moses! man. Where you been?" He squinted at me. After all, I might be "stringing him." "That," he said, "is as old as Adam. It was run to death so long ago I can't remember. That? That's 'Paragon Park.' That is the old original first 'Shimmie' dance--with whiskers two foot long--" "The original what?" "Shimmie! _Shimmie!_ Say, honest to God, don't you know--?" And with his shoulders he made a wriggling gesture in appeal to my wits, the crudest burlesque, it seemed, of a divinely abominable gesture in my memory.--"That?" he queried. "Eh?" "Shimmie," I echoed, and, my mind skipping back: "_Shemdance! Shame Dance!_--I see!"