Popular amongst baritone singers, end a great favourite at smoking concerts, is the song of the floral dance. The singer tells of his adventures in a "quaint old Cornish town," where, to the sound of the fiddle and cornet, big bass viol and bass trombone, the merry revellers set the world a dancing. That quaint old Cornish town was eu! fete last month. There were not t big bass viol and elfin fiddle give artistic verisimilitude to the! festival.
The music was supplied by the conscientious town band. The festivity was certainly not so riotous as it was in the historic day when Flora Day was the saturnalia of the year, when the dancer was licensed to pick up his partner and carry her off like a cave man. Dancers did\not make quite so free with their heighbour's habitations jas in the heroic times when no man's jkouse was his castle, safe from the visitations of whirling couples, who} burst in at one door and pirouetted through to go out by the other. But within the limits of convention the Flora Day of Helston was all that tradition could suggest.
The famous furry dance was the event, and the whole town, with a largo number of visitors, took part in it. Partners formed up at Corn Exchange, and, with the band at their head, waltzed solemnly through the town. They visited and waltzed through cerfiin favoured houses, where they were expected and' welcome, and having danced through the Cornish sunshine, they returned rythmically and in good order to the place from which they came.
The ritual appears to bear some relation to the name and origin of the ancient and once famous town. Helston, says the legend, is Helle's stone. Until the year 1783 the solid reck and foundation of the romance of Helston was a huge block of granite which lay in an inn yard. This was the stone of tradition, and it once upon a time lay at the mouth of Hell to guard the entrance against uninferna] intruders. One day the Devil, setting - off for a diabolic spree, picked up the.stone and headed for Cornwall. He flew over the duchy, playing with the pebble in his ffight. St.. Michael, who is the patron saint of Helston, and one of the many guardian saintssof-Cornwall, discovered him and ordered him off. There was a combat, and the Devil got the worst of it. He fied, and in his haste let tall the stone. which fell where, for hundreds of years, it lay, and all rejoiced that the evil one had been shown the nearest way out of Cornwall. To celebrate the victory the furry dance was then and there authorized and established.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.