It is no proof that Dorcas was a beauty, that she looked often in the
little mirror. Ugliness is quite as anxious as beauty on that point,
and is even oftener found gazing with sad solicitude at itself, if
haply there may be found some mollifying or mitigating circumstance,
either in outline or expression. But Dorcas's face pleased herself and
everybody else.
A certain freedom and ease, the result partly of a symmetrical form,
and partly of conscious good-looks, gave the grace of movement to
Dorcas which attracted all eyes. Almost every one has a sense of
harmony, and old and young loved to watch the musical motion of Dorcas
Fox, whatever she might be doing,--whether she queened it at the
"Thanksgiving Ball," and from heel-and-toe, pigeon-wing, or mazy
double-shuffle, evolved the finest and subtlest intricacies of muscle,
or whether, on the Sabbath, walking behind her parents to meeting,
she married the movement to the solemnity of the day, and, as it were,
walked in long metre.
She always was in Hallelujah metre to the Blacks, Whites, Grays,
Greens, and Browns that color so largely every New-England community;
and the youths who were wont to form the crowd that invariably settled
at the corner of the meeting-house waited only till Dorcas Fox went up
the "broad-oil" to express open-mouthed admiration.
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