, he played for us and he played for us, tune after tune;
and we danced,--first with precision, then in sport, then in wild
holiday frenzy. We began with waltzes,--so great is the convenience of
travelling with your wives,--where should we have been, had we been all
sole alone, four men? Probably playing whist or euchre. And now we began
with waltzes, which passed into polkas, which subsided into round
dances; and then in very exhaustion we fell back in a grave quadrille. I
danced with Hosanna; Wolfgang and Sarah were our _vis-a-vis_. We went
through the same set that Noah and his three boys danced in the ark with
their four wives, and which has been danced ever since, in every moment,
on one or another spot of the dry earth, going round it with the sun,
like the drumbeat of England,--right and left, first two forward, right
hand across, _pastorale_,--the whole series of them; we did them with
as much spirit as if it had been on a flat on the side of Ararat, ground
yet too muddy for croquet. Then Blatchford called for "Virginia Reel,"
and we raced and chased through that. Poor Caesar began to get exhausted,
but a little flip from down stairs helped him amazingly. And, after the
flip, Dick cried, "Can you not dance 'Money-Musk'?" And in one wild
frenzy of delight we danced "Money-Musk" and "Hull's Victory" and "Dusty
Miller" and "Youth's Companion," and "Irish Jigs" on the closet-door
lifted off for the occasion, till the men lay on the floor screaming
with the fun, and the women fell back on the sofas, fairly faint with
laughing.

* * * * *

All this last, since the sentence after "Circassia," is a mistake. There
was not any bell, nor any barber, and we did not dance at all. This was
all a slip of my memory.

What we really did was this:--

John Blatchford said,--"Let us all tell stories." It was growing dark
and he had put more logs on the fire.

Bertha said,--

"Heap on more wood, the wind is chill;
But let it whistle as it will,
We'll keep our merry Christmas still."

She said that because it was in "Bertha's Visit," a very stupid book
which she remembered.

Then Wolfgang told

THE PENNY-A-LINER'S STORY.

[Wolfgang is a reporter, or was then, on the staff of the "Star."]

When I was on the "Tribune" (he never was on the "Tribune" an hour,
unless he calls selling the "Tribune" at Fort Plains being on the
"Tribune"). But I tell the story as he told it. He said