In the meantime the Humanes, and the Samaritans, and the Benevolents, and the rest of the mob, did not stand and look on quite as mum as if it had been an overbrimming Quaker’s meeting, with a collection afterwards at the door for the Deaf and Dumb. They chuckled, and crowed, and laughed till they brayed again; and roared, and bellowed, and shouted, and shrieked like hyænas in hysterics. “Huzza! huzzaw! Go it, Jack! That’s your sort encore--ancore--anker--ancoore,--bravo--brawvo--bravoo--brawvoo! Well done Tony--Tony for ever--Tony for my money!--keep it up! It’s better than dancing upon nothing.” If Laporte had been there, who knows what offer he might have made them; for Taglioni herself never danced so--that is to say, gratis, and without music. On they jigged, however, without let or stint, and may I hang my hat up for ever, if the same whim did not suddenly take the marshal, janitor, or head gaoler, however unfit for dancing, seeing that one of his legs was made of the same flesh as my oak table. Timber or not, he balanced on it for a whole minute, while the other foot’s great toe, far above his hip, pointed exactly at the clock of St. Sepulchre, and then swinging his arms like a horizontal windmill, he spun off into a whirlwind of pirouettes that made one giddy to look at. That done, he struck in between the other two with a real step, and they immediately began to work out a dancing sum in the rule of three, which requires only one figure, namely, a figure of eight. Scuffle, shuffle, in and out, the three Kirk Alloway witches could not have footed it better. In fact, there was no resisting it. The whim took the very Ordinary himself, though less boisterously at first, by reason of the gravity of his calling, wherefore, taking a graceful grip with either hand of his cassock, he only glided off, to begin with, into the minuet de la cour. However, as the dancing grew more fast and furious, he gradually danced, in spite of himself, having been classically bred, into the College Hornpipe, and I defy anyone to say they ever saw it better danced, or more briskly, by the very Doctors of Oxford and Cambridge. Mother of Almack’s, what a quadrille! What a ball! The three Fates, though winders of thread, and spinsters in ordinary, had never seen such a Cotton ball! It was the strangest capriccio, the rarest mad morrice that ever was danced; one minute a mazurka, then a polonaise, then a gallopade, then a fandango, then a bolero, then a saraband, then a guaracha, then a Highland fling! Sometimes the Strangulator, by help of the halter which he waved this way and that, seemed executing the shawl dance; anon, he doubled shuffled like Dusty Bob. One minute Tony appeared as measuring his steps with a duchess dowager of the time of Louis the Fourteenth; the next he was snapping his fingers with Maggie Lauder to the tune of Tullochgorum. You fancied one minute, that the Ordinary was dancing a pas seul, to the music of Haydn’s slow