Morning Appeal

They Used to Run It in Nebraska.

Charley Moeller, of Steamboat, was in town yesterday. He has decided to give a dance at the Springs sometime next month, when there is plenty of moonlight. Due notice of the time will be given, and a special train will go out for the accommodation of Reno people. --Journal.

The harvest dance is just what is needed to liven up agriculture in Nevada. No State ever became thoroughly agricultural without the harvest dance having been introduced. The ordinary dances of the "Au Fait" and "En Route" parties may do for the fashionable world, but your horny-fisted farmer wants something more exhilarating.

The writer well remembers the harvest dance in old Nebraska. He was induced to attend one and never attended another, as the sport seemed too lively for a man of retiring habits. It was two miles from Milikin's Corners, near Brownsville, and people came there from a radius of ten miles. The merry harvesters began to shuffle over the boards about 8 o'clock and at nine the affair livened up. An Otoe county harvester was going through the "balance to the right" figure, when a Crete county rancher hit him just under the ear and knocked him into the next set. The dance went on all the same, however, for when the insensible man was taken out and laid on the grass to cool, a wall-flower hard by waltzed right into the set and swung the girl, who embraced her partner with a bewitching smile, as if nothing had happened. After the set another lot of corn juice was circulated and a couple of men were thrown through a window. Two wall-flowers, however, were on deck immediately and took the two girls through the figures, and all was as merry as a marriage bell.

At midnight supper was announced, and there being fewer women than men something had to be done. It was done at once. Five men were then knocked down and dragged out, and all done in an orderly and quiet way. While there were fights here and there, there was no general row and the company, as a rule, were well behaved.

Just as the writer was escorting a plump Gage county girl to the table a two hundred pound harvester leaped toward him and threw his right arm back with a crank and lever motion. It looked as if a good deal of heaviness was coming our way, when the fiddler laid his hand on the harvester's arm and said:

"Hold on, the sexes are even; you'll find a girl over there."

The man lowered his battering ram, and allowed the writer to live on.

It is the rule at harvest dances that when there are a dozen or so more men than women, the surplus men are knocked out and sent to the rear after they have had a dance or two. The harvester who was advancing upon our head gear, had made a miscount and overlooked the fact that there was no necessity, under the rules, of crushing another man. These were the blithe and merry harvest dances of Nebraska, celebrating the reaping of the golden grain and the garnering of surplus men, and Nevada will never be looked upon as an agricultural district of the first class until she gives the harvest dance a fair trial.