“We come here to bounce around,
     We come here to bounce around,
     We come here to bounce around,
       Tra, la, la! 
       Ladies, do si do,
       Gents, you know,
       Swing to the right,
       And then to the left,
       And all promenade!”

Oh, yes!  I have seen Wades and Flemings and Holbrooks and all the rest singing and hopping about to the tune of We Come Here to Bounce Around; and also We’ll All Go Down to Rowser; and Hey, Jim Along, Jim Along Josie; and Angelina Do Go Home; and Good-by Susan Jane; and Shoot the Buffalo; and Weevilly Wheat; and Sandy He Belonged to the Mill; and I’ve Been to the East, I’ve Been to the West, I’ve Been to the Jay-Bird’s Altar; and Skip-to-My-Lou; and The Juniper Tree; and Go In and Out the Window; and The Jolly Old Miller; and Captain Jinks; and lots more of them.  Boyds and Burnses and Smythes tripping the light fantastic with them, and not half a dozen dresses better than alpacas in the crowd, and the men many of them in drilling trousers—­and half of them with hayseed in their hair from the load on which they rode to the party!  So, ye Iowa aristocracy, put that in your pipes and smoke it, as ye bowl over the country in your automobiles—­or your airships, as I suppose it may be before you read this!

I went round with the rest of them, for I had seen all these plays on the canal boats, and had once or twice taken part in them.  Kittie Fleming, very graceful and gracious as she bowed to me, and as I swung her around, was my partner.  Bob Wade still devoted himself to Virginia, who was like a fairy in her fine pink silk dress.

“This is enough of these plays,” shouted Bob at last, after looking about to see that his father and mother were not in the room.  “Let’s have the ’Needle’s Eye’!”

“The ’Needle’s Eye’!” was the cry, then.

“I won’t play kissing games!” said one or two of the girls.

“Le’s have ’The Gay Balonza Man’!” shouted Doctor Bliven, who was in the midst of the gaieties, while his wife too, plunged in as if to outdo him.

“Oh, yes!” she said, smiling up into the face of Frank Finster, with whom she had been playing.  “Let’s have ‘The Gay Balonza Man!’ It’s such fun[13]!”

[13] One here discovers a curious link between our recent past and olden times in our Old Home, England.  This game has like most of the kissing or play-party games of our fathers (and mothers) more than one version.  By some it was called “The Gay Galoney Man,” by others “The Gay Balonza Man.”  It is a last vestige of the customs of the sixteenth century and earlier in England.  It was brought over by our ancestors, and survived in Iowa at the time of its settlement, and probably persists still in remote localities settled by British immigrants.  The “Gay Balonza Man” must be the character—­the traveling beggar, pedler or tinker,—­who was the hero of country-side people, and of the poem attributed to James V. called The Gaberlunzie-Man (1512-1542) in which the event is summed up in two lines relating to a peasant girl, “She’s aff wi the gaberlunzie-man.”  The words of the play run in part as follows: