Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/64

40 through a Virginia Reel, or Lancers could be called that—to the sharp voice of an attenuated piano! It was great fun and seemed real,—beside it was contraband. Just across the Connecticut river good people played cards and loved God, while this side such recreation was wicked as Juggernaut or idols! For secrecy's sake, the name "Poetry of Motion meetings," to be sure. Once only were they surreptitiously invited to gather at the home of the dignified pair who were to be away for the night, and would therefore remain in blest ignorance of this departure on the part of their young people, Emily and Austin, from the moral code of those days. All went merry as a marriage bell. The revellers danced late and with quite an abandon. But trifles light as air are time proven betrayers,—the slight scarlet thread of Jezebel, Newton's apple, Fulton's tea-kettle, "Great oaks from little acorns grow!" It was the lion's tail on the hearth rug in the parlor of this strict home that convulsed domesticity for twenty-four hours and led to discovery at last. Taken up to relieve the dancing toes from clumsy entanglement in the fringe, it was put back in the flurry of righting up in the morning before the parents' return, regardless of the lion's anatomy and jungle grace. He was a big brown fellow set off by a vague green background of some appropriate sort. The silly half-frightened young folk had replaced him, but completely reversed, so that his majestic tail was turned up where it should have turned down, and all his members were topsy-turvy accordingly! Only too soon after the return the maternal shriek,—"Why, girls, girls! What has happened? The lion's tail is upside down!" proved the forerunner of a little private judgment day. But eventually the mother was "managed" and recommended "not to trouble Father with it"!

One can hardly realize at the present time the importance of the two great events of the year in Amherst mid-century. These were, of course, Commencement Day and the annual Cattle Show in October. Both took place all over the Village Green.

Cattle Show was an affair of bucolic sweetness and simplicity, which Emily loved afar; especially the strains