Page:Letters from an Oregon Ranch.djvu/38

 “Good! Let the old spooks go! Say, let’s try a waltz; this old floor is a daisy.” And then, the spirit of folly being in full possession, if you could have looked through the windows of this old garret, you would have seen four elderly figures half veiled in dust gliding and whirling up and down the long room, while the rain rattled like hail upon the shingles. We thought we did it fairly well, with the exception, as Tom said, of “breathin’ a little ’ard, like the young recruit at the ’angin’ of Danny Deever.”

“Now for a schottische,” he cried, as he began whistling “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

“Oh, Tom, that’s too awfully plebeian!”

“Plebeian? That’s just where you’re wrong. The ‘shortish’ was mighty popular in airly days.”

The cuckoo below, just then chiming out the noon hour, nipped this discussion, and quickly restored our lost sanity.

“Twelve o’clock!” said Mary, excitedly. “Who could have thought we had idled away a whole hour in this idiotic fashion? I truly believe, if we had been caught at this nonsense, we would all have been clapped into strait-jackets and carted off to the madhouse!”

Tom rushed across the room to the corner of odds and ends, and hung the old hat on the top of a hoe handle, hurriedly remarking, “Mr. Milburn, revered though in visible shade, I return your valuable inheritance, thanking you kindly for its loan. The inaugural ball is now