His rusty trousers were bagged at the knee, and his red woolen stockings showed between the tops of his moccasins and his pantaloon-legs; and his coat, utterly characterless as to color and cut, added to the stoop in his shoulders, and yet there was a rude sort of grace and a certain dignity about his bearing which kept down laughter.

They were to have a square dance of the old-fashioned sort.
"_Farrm_ on," he cried, and the fiddler struck out the first note of the Virginia Reel.

Daddy led out Rose, and the dance began.

He straightened up till his tall form towered above the rest of the boys like a weather-beaten pine-tree, as he balanced and swung and led and called off the changes with a voice full of imperious command.
The fiddler took a malicious delight toward the last in quickening the time of the good old dance, and that put the old man on his mettle.
"Go it, ye young rascal!" he yelled.

He danced like a boy and yelled like a demon, catching a laggard here and there, and hurling them into place like tops, while he kicked and stamped, wound in and out and waved his hands in the air with a gesture which must have dated back to the days of Washington.