coal all night after a dinner-party, but still it
was a mighty pretty custom, and I for one, when
a venerative youth, have felt a thrill of joy at
being kindly nodded to over a bumper by some
distinguished personage who had asked me to
take wine. But woe's me, this will all be
Hebrew to many people; for, more dead than
mutton, or door-knocker, is that quality of
Veneration to which I have just alluded as
giving such an importance to the deceased
custom of " taking wine."

So much for the old-fashioned dinner. It
was alive and flourishing, some fifteen years ago,
but now it is dead, and we shall not see it again
any more, for ever. Let us toast it once, drinking
out of one of those old champagne-glasses
which were so very awkward for gentlemen with
large noses. Then let us smash the old glass,
and consign both it, and the dinner at which it
figured, to oblivion.

The world gets wiser as it gets older, and
most of our changes are wise changes, and for the
better. There is, however, one danger connected
with, and perhaps inseparable from, our modern
improvements, which the Small-Beer Chronicler
may be perhaps excused for mentioning. There
seems to be some risk of our drilling ourselves
into too uniform and regular a pattern. We
are losing variety of character and getting
wonderfully alike. Our mode of living, our way of
talking, of dressing, is all beginning to be
chalked out for us, and we depart from the
established code at such peril that scarce any one
departs from it. I am anticipating, however,
in saying this, and getting on to a portion of my
chronicle which is to come later. What I have
to do now, is to record simply the decay
of certain social practices, the removal from
the scene of certain bygone and once-valued
performers.

Continuing my list of Deaths, let me record
next the Death of the country-dance. Its
dissolution may be fitly enough mentioned here
after a registration of the death of the
old-fashioned dinner, for the two were firm and
established friends. The country-dance is dead.
When in the present day four acquaintances
happen to meet in the street, and in shaking
hands manage to cross their arms, nobody now
says " hands across" as a mot adapted to the
occasion.

I dare say few persons will be found to wear
mourning for the Death of the country-dance. Its
life was a long one, its decay was very gradual,
and it would revive from time to time even after
every one fondly imagined that it had received
the coup de grace. Continually was it urged
into a new show of vitality by kind and loving
old friends who would affectionately entreat
the poor old thing to rouse itself up and " make
an effort." Who has not seen this tough
old customer rally, and break out at the
conclusion of an evening to the dismay of
the new generation? Then how would the
members of the old society rally round their
ancient friend, and support his tottering steps.
"We are going to have a country-dance," the
hostess of the evening would proclaim, " so now,
Mr.Totterington, you must positively stand up"
—"Mrs. Witherspoon, we shall not let you off."
At the mention of their old friend the country-
dance, these two, and many more such couples,
revived and hastened to the rescue. And who
shall wonder at it? We know little of the
associations they had with that (to us) preposterous
figure, and those jigging steps. In our eyes it has
many defects. The young ladies and young
gentlemen of the day will tell you that they do not
like to stand in rows separated from each other;
that to be half an hour without speaking to your
partner or taking any important share in the
dance, is a bore; and that it is small compensation
to have to go down the middle and up again
as hard as you can a score of times when, at
length, your turn for action does come. To
stand inactive, one of a row of gentlemen or
ladies, as the case might be, while a middle-aged
lady in a cap, and a smiling old gentleman with
a bald head were performing obsolete antics at
the other end of the room, and from time to
time descending the human avenue, breathless,
in a palsied canter—this is the idea of the
country-dance which exists in the minds of the
modern swain and damsel. That old dance
wears a different aspect to the older race.
Mrs. Witherspoon, of the blonde cap, whose
existence you had been ignorant of till the
dance began, remembers, as the well-known tune
is played, the night when Mr. Witherspoon
asked her to dance at the Assembly-room at
Cheltenham. She remembers the preliminary
scraping of the fiddles, the very look of the
gentleman who led the band. She could tell
you how far down the dance, she and her partner
were when they began, and who stood next to
her, and who next to him, and how gallant he
looked with his blue coat and his hair in Brutus,
and his black pantaloons and silk stockings.
It was at the close of that dance, and as they
walked to the sixpence a cup tea-room, that he
spoke, and she listened. And shall we wonder
that a country-dance is something wonderful to
this same old lady, and ask ourselves in astonishment
what any one could see that was attractive
in its antiquated figure?

With the country-dance in its glory we have,
in this chronicle, nothing to do. It would not
become a Small-Beer Chronicler to go so far back.
Such a recorder should deal with the changes of
the moment, of the last fifteen years. Within such
a period the country-dance was alive; it was not
flourishing, it was shaky on its pins, but still
it was alive. Now it is dead, and the valse
à deux temps reigns in its stead.

And while we are talking of dancing and of
death—a queer Holbein combination—we have
another dissolution to announce, which has
certainly taken place within the period whose
changes we are examining.

The ballet is dead. Fresh in the memory of
all of us who have attained to five-and-thirty
years is the period when the rage for the ballet
equalled that for the opera. The last new ballet
was the talk of the town. Dancers were raved