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 the sets.

Then followed the schottische, then another polka until everybody was tired out, and then with one accord the young couples rushed from the hot room, hazy with the dust of lint from the linen crash, and stampeded for the cool wide stairs that led from the great hall.