A waltz was called, and I wanted a partner. Looking round, I espied a lady sitting near the end of the room, who evidently had not got one. She was in the same place when I entered the room, and it was clear to me, by her unrumpled appearance, that she had not danced for the evening. ‘Faint heart never won fair lady’ might, I imagined, apply as forcibly to dancing as to wooing or fighting; if I am snubbed it won’t be all the world, and I suppose I shall live it down—so here goes! Walking boldly up to her, I asked coolly, but rather apologetically, if she would try a waltz. ‘Guess, stranger, I ain’t a-fix’d up for waltzin.’ ‘Perhaps, madam,’ I said, ‘you will excuse me, although unknown to you, if I ask you to dance the next cotillon with me?’ Looking into my face with an expression half doubt, half delight, she said: ‘Stranger, I’ll have the tallest kind of pleasure in puttin’ you right slick through a cotillon, for I’ve sot here, like a blue chicken on a pine-log, till I was like to a-grow’d to the seat.’ This satisfactorily arranged, I sat down by her side until the waltz finished, to have a good look at and trot out my new inamorata. She was a blonde beauty, with fair hair and light-grey eyes, that flashed and twinkled roguishly; and robed in some white material, with blue ribbons in her hair and round her waist—a mountain-sylph, that any wanderer in search of a partner would have deemed himself lucky to have stumbled on. Our conversation was rather discursive, until I discovered that home-politics, or rather the duties and requirements of a _gal t’hum_, was a never-failing spring from which to draw fresh draughts of household knowledge. At last the cotillon was called by the master of the ceremonies, and again I heard—‘Take your places, salute your partners;’ the fiddles started the same kind of jigging tune, and away we went. A cotillon is a compound, complicated kind of dance, evidently constructed from the elements and fragments of many other dances: a good deal of quadrille, a strong taste of lancers, a flavour of polka and waltz—the whole highly seasoned with Indian war-dance. You never stand still, neither can you lounge and talk soft nothings to your partner—it is real, _bonâ fide_, downright, honest dancing. I soon discovered why the men left off their jackets: a trained runner could not have stood it in clothing. My jacket and waist-coat soon hung on a peg, and, red-shirted like the rest, I footed it out gallantly.