It was the custom at Baron’s Court to have two annual dances in the barn to celebrate “Harvest Home” and Christmas, and to these dances my father, and my brother after him, invited every single person in their employ, and all the neighbouring farmers and their wives.  Any one hoping to shine at a barn-dance required exceptionally sound muscles, for the dancing was quite a serious business.  The so-called barn was really a long granary, elaborately decorated with wreaths of evergreens, flags, and mottoes.  The proceedings invariably commenced with a dance (peculiar, I think, to the north of Ireland) known as “Haste to the Wedding.”  It is a country dance, but its peculiarity lies in the fact that instead of the couples standing motionless opposite to one another, they are expected to “set to each other,” and to keep on doing steps without intermission; all this being, I imagine, typical of the intense eagerness every one was supposed to express to reach the scene of the wedding festivities as quickly as possible.  Twenty minutes of “Haste to the Wedding” are warranted to exhaust the stoutest leg-muscles.  My mother always led off with the farm-bailiff as partner, my father at the other end dancing with the bailiff’s wife.  Both my father, and my brother after him, were very careful always to wear their Garter as well as their other Orders on these occasions, in order to show respect to their guests.  Scotch reels and Irish jigs alternated with “The Triumph,” “Flowers of Edinburgh,” and other country dances, until feet and legs refused their office; and still the fiddles scraped, and feet, light or heavy, belaboured the floor till 6 a.m.  The supper would hardly have come up to London standards, for instead of light airy nothings, huge joints of roast and boiled were aligned down the tables.  Some of the stricter Presbyterians, though fond of a dance, experienced conscientious qualms about it.  So they struck an ingenious compromise with their consciences by dancing vigorously whilst assuming an air of intense misery, as though they were undergoing some terrible penance.  Every one present enjoyed these barn-dances enormously.

My father was an admirable speaker of the old-fashioned school, with calculated pauses, an unusual felicity in the choice of his epithets, and a considerable amount of gesticulation.  The veteran Lord Chaplin is the last living exponent of this type of oratory.  Although my father prepared his speeches very carefully indeed, he never made a single written note.  He had a beautiful speaking voice and a prodigious memory; this memory, he knew from experience, would not fail him.  An excellent shot himself both with gun and rifle, and a good fisherman, to the end of his life he maintained his interest in sport and in all the pursuits of the younger life around him, for he was very human.