Arthur himself had provided the prizes for the men, and Bill was made happy with a splendid pocket-knife, supplied with blades and gimlets enough to make a man at home on a desert island.  He had hardly returned from the marquee with the prize in his hand, when it began to be understood that Wiry Ben proposed to amuse the company, before the gentry went to dinner, with an impromptu and gratuitous performance—­namely, a hornpipe, the main idea of which was doubtless borrowed; but this was to be developed by the dancer in so peculiar and complex a manner that no one could deny him the praise of originality.  Wiry Ben’s pride in his dancing—­an accomplishment productive of great effect at the yearly Wake—­had needed only slightly elevating by an extra quantity of good ale to convince him that the gentry would be very much struck with his performance of his hornpipe; and he had been decidedly encouraged in this idea by Joshua Rann, who observed that it was nothing but right to do something to please the young squire, in return for what he had done for them.  You will be the less surprised at this opinion in so grave a personage when you learn that Ben had requested Mr. Rann to accompany him on the fiddle, and Joshua felt quite sure that though there might not be much in the dancing, the music would make up for it.  Adam Bede, who was present in one of the large marquees, where the plan was being discussed, told Ben he had better not make a fool of himself—­a remark which at once fixed Ben’s determination:  he was not going to let anything alone because Adam Bede turned up his nose at it.

“What’s this, what’s this?” said old Mr. Donnithorne.  “Is it something you’ve arranged, Arthur?  Here’s the clerk coming with his fiddle, and a smart fellow with a nosegay in his button-hole.”

“No,” said Arthur; “I know nothing about it.  By Jove, he’s going to dance!  It’s one of the carpenters—­I forget his name at this moment.”

“It’s Ben Cranage—­Wiry Ben, they call him,” said Mr. Irwine; “rather a loose fish, I think.  Anne, my dear, I see that fiddle-scraping is too much for you:  you’re getting tired.  Let me take you in now, that you may rest till dinner.”

Miss Anne rose assentingly, and the good brother took her away, while Joshua’s preliminary scrapings burst into the “White Cockade,” from which he intended to pass to a variety of tunes, by a series of transitions which his good ear really taught him to execute with some skill.  It would have been an exasperating fact to him, if he had known it, that the general attention was too thoroughly absorbed by Ben’s dancing for any one to give much heed to the music.

Have you ever seen a real English rustic perform a solo dance?  Perhaps you have only seen a ballet rustic, smiling like a merry countryman in crockery, with graceful turns of the haunch and insinuating movements of the head.  That is as much like the real thing as the “Bird Waltz” is like the song of birds.  Wiry Ben never smiled:  he looked as serious as a dancing monkey—­as serious as if he had been an experimental philosopher ascertaining in his own person the amount of shaking and the varieties of angularity that could be given to the human limbs.