My young toes tingled to begin, and when the fiddles and other instruments of music tuned up in a frolicsome country dance, the swains began to pick out favourite partners. The bride and bridegroom stood top couple, and I don’t know who came next, for while I was hoping and fearing whether anybody would ask me, Cousin David arrived and spun me up to the end of a long rank of girls. The fiddles started, and Sophy shrieked out franticly, “Now, Poppy, Poppy, be ready! It’s hands across and back again, down the middle and up again—Cousin Mary and David, and you and George Standish!” and then away we went! We shall never dance a country dance like that again! Cousin David emulated his royal Hebrew namesake, and I should have thought him a delightful partner if he would not quite so often have made me do my steps on nothing. That was glorious exercise for a frosty winter’s evening, and made all our cheeks rosy and all our eyes bright. When that set was finished, curly Mr. Dick came and asked me to dance the next with him, which I did, and then to the tune of “Merrily danced the Quaker’s wife, and merrily danced the Quaker,” Bob Link was my partner. That medical youth had missed his vocation in not going as clown to a circus, for the grotesquerie of his actions, and the inimitable solemnity of his visage, kept everybody in roars of laughter all through his performance, and we never had to meet and take hold of hands that he did not address me with some absurd speech that made me peal out just like the rest. I never sat out once. It was great fun. We had the “Lancers,” in which everybody was perfect, and common quadrilles, and sarabandes, and one or two tried a waltz, but country dances were the favourites, and there the elders joined in. Uncle and Aunt Preston danced, and old Mr. Jewson, who chose me for his partner, and took snuff at intervals, through the set, and nodded his wig at me, but never spoke. Just before supper somebody called out for a game of forfeits, and “My Lady’s Toilet” was fixed upon. Do you know how to play “Lady’s Toilet?” It is an old-fashioned game that all our revered grandmothers played at, though exploded in polite society now, but I daresay it still survives at wold weddings. And this is the way of it. Each person in the company chooses the name of some article of a lady’s dress, and all sit round the room in order except one, who stands in the middle with a trencher which he begins to spin on the floor, singing out monotonously— “My lady went to her toilet, In her chamber so pretty and neat, And said to her damsel Oyclet, ‘Bring me my _bracelet_, sweet.’” And then the person called Bracelet must dash in and catch the trencher before it ceases to spin, on the penalty of a forfeit, which may be glove, handkerchief or what not. All the forfeits are kept until the close of the game, and then the penalties are exacted.