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.
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