Dancing.
DANCING is the most agreeable of all indoor pastimes that combine pleasure with healthful exercise. It also gives grace and elasticity to the movements. The modern gymnasium has many of the attractions of our dancing schools, but its exercises are often too violent for delicate children. The dancing school has proved physically beneficial to many who have been sent to it as an experiment, at an early age. Such exercise invigorates the frame and does more for permanent health than can be accomplished by medicine. Exercise, to be beneficial, must have some pleasant excitement connected with it.
It is a pleasant sight to see a home circle, old and young, joining in a lively quadrille, or an old fashioned contra dance, in the early evening hour, either the mother or a daughter presiding at the piano. How joyously even children of three and four years old make their tiny feet move in time to merry music. “Pop goes the Weasel” is a dance only suited to little children, and they are apt scholars and can all join in singing the popular tune. It may be well to give the directions for this and a few other dances.
POP GOES THE WEASEL.
This is an old English dance revived. The positions first taken are the same as in the contra dance, the ladies and gentlemen being placed in lines opposite to each other. The couple at the top begin the figures. They first dance down outside the lines and back, then join hands and down the middle, then join hands with the lady of the couple next to them and the three dance around in a circle till the music comes to “Pop goes the Weasel.” As they sing that, the second lady passes quickly under the joined hands of the couple dancing, and goes to her place; the same couple then join hands with the gentleman opposite, and at the proper time he pops under their joined hands in like manner; then down outside, back again and join hands and down the middle; then take the next lady and dance around as before. So on through the whole line. As soon as the top couple have danced down twice, the next couple begins. If there are long lines, there is often a number of couples dancing together, and when all sing in time the dance is very pretty.