Allans?"

"Yes, indeed! and the cake with candles on it and all your best friends
to wish you many happy returns."

"Well, you know the nineteenth will be my birthday, and I want to have a
party and a cake with candles and all our best friends here to wish you
and me many happy returns of the happiest birthday we have spent
together. I only wish old Cy were here to play for us to dance! I'd give
something pretty to have him and his fiddle here, just to see what these
sober-sided Penn folk would think of them. My, wouldn't they make a
sensation in the 'City of Brotherly Love!'" He began whistling as
clearly and correctly as a piccolo the air of a recently published
waltz. After a few bars he sprang to his feet and--still
whistling--quickly shoved the table and chairs to the wall, clearing the
middle of the floor. The tune stopped long enough for him to say,

"Come, Sweetheart, you must dance this with me. My feet refuse to be
still tonight!"--then was taken up again.

The beautiful girl was in his arms in an instant and while "Muddie," in
her seat by the window, lifted her deep eyes from the work in her
ever-busy hands and let them rest with a smile of indulgent bliss upon
her "children," they glided round and round the room to the time of the
fascinating new dance.

At length they stopped, breathless and rosy, and the poet, with
elaborate ceremony, handed his fair partner to a chair and began fanning
her with "Muddie's" turkey-tail fan. He was in a glow of warmth and
pleasure. His wonderful eyes shone like lamps. His pale cheeks were
tinged with faint pink. While fanning Virginia with one hand he gently
mopped the pleasant moisture from his brow with the other. Virginia's
eyes shot sunshine. Her laughter bubbled up like a well-spring of pure
joy.

"What would people say if they could see the great Mr. Poe--the grand,
gloomy and peculiar Mr. Poe--the author of 'Tales of the Grotesque and
Arabesque,' who's supposed to be continually 'dropping from his Condor
wings invisible woe?'" said she, as soon as she could speak. The idea
was so vastly amusing to her that she laughed until the shining eyes
were filled with dew.

"If they could know half the pleasure I got out of that they wouldn't
say anything," he replied. "They would be dumb with envy. I suppose it's
my mother in me, but I just _must_ dance sometimes. And this waltz! In
spite of all the prudes say against it, it is the divinest thing in the
way of motion