And, hilariously, yet perhaps with some moist eyes among them, the company gathered to see Aunt ’Mira lead her reluctant spouse out upon the floor. Aunt ’Mira was radiant—and wonderfully dressed! There was no younger feeling person in the house when Hopewell struck up a reel and Mr. and Mrs. Jason Day led the figure.
Janice and Nelson Haley danced in the same set, and were very happy. So did Frank Bowman and his sister, the latter welcomed for her brother’s sake if not for her own.
Uncle Jason began to get livened up. He found he had not forgotten the figures. When his wife was breathless he insisted upon dancing with Mrs. Scattergood, the lugubrious. Then he seized upon Janice, and finally he danced with the bride before the time came to go home.
The party broke up at an early hour, for the morrow’s morn was Christmas and, therefore, a busy one. It was a brilliant moonlight night as the merrymakers left the old store on the side street and struck out along the well-shoveled paths on their homeward way.
Janice and the school teacher were behind her aunt and uncle as they came out—the last of the company to leave. Miss ’Rill was briskly putting out the lamps in the store windows. But from the rear came the scraping of the old fiddle to the lilt of a lively tune again, and Janice and Nelson stepped off through the snow to the tune of
“Jingle bells! Jingle bells!
Jingle all the way.”
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.