I might delight you with a description of the ball room, but the editors have requested me to the contrary. Some secrets of gorgeous splendor there are which are wisely concealed from the general gaze. But a floor three hundred feet square, and walls as high as the mast of an East Boston clipper, confer ample room for motion; and the unequalled atmosphere of the saloon is perhaps unnecessarily refreshed by fountains of rarest distilled waters. This is also my picture gallery, where all mythology is exhausted by the great painters of the antique; and modern art is thoroughly illustrated by the famous landscapes of both hemispheres. The luxuriant fancy of my favorite artist has suggested unique collocations of aquaria and mossy grottoes in the angles of the apartment, where the vegetable wealth of the tropics rises in perfect bounty and lawless exuberance, and fishes of every hue and shape flash to and fro among the tangled roots, in the light of a thousand lamps. In the centre, I have caused the seats of the orchestra to be hidden at the summit of a picturesque group of rocks, profusely hung with vegetation, and gemmed with a hundred tiny fountains that trickle in bright beads and diamonds into the reservoir at the base. From this eminence, the melody of sixty unequalled performers pervades the saloon, justly diffused, and on all sides the same; unlike the crude arrangements of most modern orchestras, where at one end of the room you are deluged with music, and at the other extremity you distinguish the notes with pain or difficulty. The ceiling, by a rare combination of mechanical ingenuity and artistic inspiration, displays, so as to quite deceive the senses, the heavens with all their stars moving in just and harmonious order. Here on summer nights you see Lyra and Altair triumphantly blazing in the middle sky as they sweep their mighty arch through the ample zenith; and low in the south, the Scorpion crawls along the verge with the red Antares at his heart, and the bright arrows of the Archer forever pursuing him. Here in winter, gazing up through the warm and perfumed air, you behold those bright orbs that immemorially suggest the icy blasts of January: Aldebaran; the mighty suns of Orion; diamond-like Capella; and the clear eyes of the Gemini. Under such influences, with the breath of the tropics in your nostrils, and your heart stirred by the rich melodies of the invisible orchestra, waltzing becomes a sublime passion, in which all your faculties dilate to utmost expansion, and you float out into happy forgetfulness of time and destiny.