This pleasant recreation began also to show its agreeable effects in the increased intimacy of the partners and the spirit of the party. All diffidence in standing up had ceased--and now the only difficulty was for the aspirants to get room on which to make their complicated steps; and oh, the precision, regularity, and energy of those motions! Although the piper played with a rapidity which would have convinced the uninitiated of the impossibility of dancing to the time, every foot in the room fell to the notes of the music as surely as though the movements of the whole set had been regulated by a steam machine. And such movements as they were! Not only did the feet keep time, but every limb and every muscle had each its own work, and twisted, shook and twirled itself in perfect unison and measure, the arms performed their figure with as much accuracy as the legs. "Take a sup of punch now, Miss Tierney; shure you're fainting away entirely for the want of a dhrop." The lady addressed was wiping, with the tail of her gown, a face which showed the labour that had been necessary to perform the feat of dancing down the whole company to the tune of the "wind that shakes the barley," and was now leaning against the wall, whilst her last partner was offering her punch made on the half and half system: "Take a sup, Miss Tierney, then; shure you're wanting it." "Thank ye, Mr. Kelly, but I am afther taking a little jist now, and the head's not sthrong with me afther dancing;" she took the tumbler, however. "Faix, Mr. Kelly, but it's yourself can make a tumbler of punch with any man." "'Deed then there's no sperrits in it at all--only a thrifle to take the wakeness off the water. Come, Miss Tierney, you didn't take what'd baptize a babby." "It'd be a big babby then; one like yerself may be." "Here's long life to the first you have yerself, any way, Miss Tierney!" and he finished the glass, of which the blushing beauty had drunk half. "Might a boy make a guess who'd be the father of it?" "Go asy now, masther Morty,"--the swain rejoiced in the name of Mortimer Kelley. "It'll be some quiet, dacent fellow, that an't given to chaffing nor too fond of sperrits." "By dad, my darling, and an't that me to a hair's breadth?" "Is it you a dacent, asy boy?" "Shure if it an't me, where's sich a one in the counthry at all? And it's I'd be fond of the child--and the child's mother more especial," and he gave her a loving squeeze, which in a less energetic society might have formed good ground for an action for violent assault. "Ah don't! Go asy I tell you, Morty. But come, an't you going to dance instead of wasting your time here all night?" and the pair, re-invigorated by their intellectual and animal refreshment, again commenced their dancing.