The black boy went, and returned with his violin. And as the light grew gray, and crept into the darkness, and as the darkness gathered more thick and more, 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 other 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 drum-beat 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 downstairs 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 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."]