He had to stand aside. Hoot! The
dancers had just time to get out of the way. The scowling motorists
vanished. Dancers and dysard, presently visible through the subsiding
dust, looked rather foolish and crestfallen. And all the branches of
the conservative old elm above them seemed to be quivering with
indignation.
In a sense this elm was a mere parvenu as compared with its beloved
dancers. True, it had been no mere sapling in the reign of the seventh
Henry, and so could remember distinctly the first Morris danced here.
But the first Morris danced on English soil was not, by a long chalk,
the first Morris. Scarves such as these were waved, and bells such as
these were jangled, and some such measure as this was trodden, in the
mists of a very remote antiquity. Spanish buccaneers, long before the
dawn of the fifteenth century, had seen the Moors dancing somewhat
thus to the glory of Allah. Home-coming, they had imitated that
strange and savage dance, expressive, for them, of the joy of being on
firm native land again. The `Morisco' they called it; and it was much
admired; and the fashion of it spread throughout Spain--scaled the
very Pyrenees, and invaded France. To the `Maurisce' succumbed `tout
Paris' as quickly as in recent years it succumbed to the cake-walk.
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