“The Wreck of the Grosvenor
“The Grosvenor, an East Indiaman, homeward bound, went to pieces on the coast of Caffraria. There were a hundred and thirty-five souls on board, and they resolved to cross the trackless desert to the Dutch settlements at the Cape of Good Hope. A solitary child was among the passengers, a boy of seven years old, who had no relation on board, and when he saw the party beginning to move away, he cried after some member of it, who had been kind to him. The child’s cry went to every heart. They accepted him as a sacred charge.
“By turns they carried him through the deep sand and the long grass. They pushed him across broad rivers on a little raft. They shared with him such fish as they found to eat. Beset by lions, by savages, by hunger and death in ghastly forms, they never—O Father in heaven! Thy name be blessed for it! they never forgot the child. The captain and his faithful coxswain sat down together to die, the rest go on for their lives—but they take the child with them. The carpenter, his chief friend, dies from eating, 76 in his hunger, poisonous berries; the steward assumed the sacred guardianship of the boy. He carried him in his arms, when he himself was weak and suffering. He fed him, when he was griped with hunger. He laid his little white face against his sun-burned breast. He soothed him in all his suffering.
“Then there came a time when both were ill, and they begged their wretched companions—now very few in number—to wait for them one day. They waited two days. On the morning of the third day, they moved softly about preparing to resume their journey. The child was sleeping by the fire, and they would not wake him until the last moment. The moment comes, the fire is dying—the child is dead!
“His faithful friend staggers on for a few days, then lies down in the desert and dies. What shall be said to these two men, who through all extremities loved and guarded this Little Child?”
Christine had noticed the Domine rise, and she pointedly addressed this question to him, and he understood her wish, and lifting up his hands and his voice, he cried out triumphantly:
“They shall be raised up with the words—‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me!’ These good men,” he continued, “were men of the sea, Mariners of England,
“That guard our native seas,
Whose flag has braved a thousand years,
The battle and the breeze!”
The Domine might have continued, but there was a sudden thrill of enchanting violins, the door was flung open, and the magical notes of a foursome reel filled the room, and set the feet of all tapping the floor, and made all faces radiant with anticipation. The good man then realized that it was not his hour, and he sat down, and watched the proceedings for a few minutes. Then he saw James Ruleson take his wife’s hand, and watched their first steps in the joyous reel, and he was satisfied. If the dancing was under Ruleson’s control, he knew all would be done decently and in order, and he went away so quietly that his absence was not noticed for some time.
Now, if the dancing that followed was like some of our dancing of today, I should pass it with slight notice, or it might be, with earnest disapproval, but it was not. It was real dancing. It was not waltzing, nor tangoing, and it was as far as possible from the undressed posturing called classical dancing. Everyone was modestly clothed, and had his shoes and stockings on. And naturally, and as a matter of course, they obeyed the principle of real dancing, which is articulation; that is, the foot strikes the ground with every accented note of the music. This is how Goldsmith in “The Vicar of Wakefield” 78 shows us Olivia dancing—“her foot being as pat to the music, as its echo.”
All good dancing is beautiful, and it never requires immodesty, is indeed spoiled by any movement in this direction. However, as my fisher company danced modestly and gracefully, rendering naturally the artistic demands of the music, there is no necessity to pursue the subject. As the night wore on, the dancing became more enthusiastic, and graceful gestures were flung in, and little inspiring cries flung out, and often when the fiddles stopped, the happy feet went on for several bars without the aid of music.