had ever dreamed of its possibilities before,
although everybody knew it was the largest in the county. The gentle
hostess, with old Alec as head of the pulling-out-and-moving-off
department, had wrought the change. All the chairs, tables, sofas, and
screens, little and big, had either been spirited away or pushed back
against the wall for tired dancers. Over the wide floor was stretched
a linen crash; from the ceiling and bracketed against the white walls,
relieved here and there by long silken curtains of gold-yellow, blazed
clusters of candles, looking for all the world like so many bursting
sky-rockets, while at one end, behind a mass of flowering plants, sat a
quartette of musicians, led by an old darky with a cotton-batting head,
who had come all the way from Philadelphia a-purpose.

Nor had the inner man been forgotten: bowls of hot apple toddy steamed
away in the dining-room; bowls of eggnog frothed away in the library;
ladlings of punch, and the contents of several old cut-glass decanters,
flanked by companies of pipe-stem glasses, were being served in the
dressing-rooms; while relays of hot terrapin, canvas-back duck, sizzling
hot; olio, cold joints; together with every conceivable treatment and
condition of oysters--in scallop shells, on silver platters and
in wooden plates--raw, roasted, fried, broiled, baked, and
stewed--everything in fact that could carry out the colonel's watchword,
"Eat, drink, and be merry," were within the beck and call of each and
every guest.

And there were to be no interludes of hunger and thirst if the host
could help it. No dull pauses nor recesses, but one continued round,
lasting until midnight, at which hour the final banquet in the
dining-room was to be served, and the great surprise of the evening
reached--the formal announcement of Harry and Kate's engagement,
followed by the opening of the celebrated bottle of the Jefferson 1800
Monticello Madeira, recorked at our young hero's birth.

And it goes without saying that there were no interludes. The fun began
at once, a long line of merry talk and laughter following the wake of
the procession, led by the host and Kate, the colonel signalling at last
to the cotton-batting with the goggle spectacles, who at once struck up
a polka and away they all went, Harry and Kate in the lead, the whole
room in a whirl.

This over and the dancers out of breath, Goggles announced a
quadrille--the colonel and St. George helping to form th