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“Ho! slave,” said Dick to Hosanna, “play upon the virginals.” And Hosanna played a lively Arab air on the tavern piano, while the fair Bertha danced with a spirit unusual. Was it indeed in memory of the Christmas of her own dear home in Circassia?

All that, from “Bertha” to “Circassia,” is not so. We did not do this at all. That was all a slip of the pen. What we did was this. John Blatchford pulled the bell-cord till it broke (they always break in novels, and sometimes they do in taverns). This bell-cord broke. The sleepy boy came; and John said, “Caitiff, is there never a barber in the house?” The frightened boy said there was; and John bade him send him. In a minute the barber appeared–black, as was expected–with a shining face, and white teeth, and in shirt-sleeves, and broad inquiry.

“Do you tell me, Caesar,” said John, “that in your country they do not wear their coats on Christmas Day?”

“Sartin, they do, sah, when they go outdoors.”

“Do you tell me, Caesar,” said Dick, “that they have doors in your country?”

“Sartin, they do,” said poor Caesar, flurried.

“Boy,” said I, “the gentlemen are making fun of you. They want to know if you ever keep Christmas in your country without a dance.”

“Never, sah,” said poor Caesar.

“Do they dance without music?”

“No, sah; never.”

“Go, then,” I said, in my sternest accents,–“go fetch a zithern, or a banjo, or a kit, or a hurdy-gurdy, or a fiddle.”

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.”]

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:] When I was on the “Tribune,” I was despatched to report Mr. Webster’s great reply
to Hayne. This was in the days of stages. We had to ride from Baltimore to Washington early in the morning to get there in time. I found my boots were gone from my room when the stage-man called me, and I reported that speech in worsted slippers my wife had given me the week before. As we came into Bladensburg, it grew light, and I recognized my boots on the feet of my fellow- passenger,–there was but one other man in the stage. I turned to claim them, but stopped in a moment, for it was Webster himself. How serene his face looked as he slept there! He woke soon, passed the time of day, offered me a part of a sandwich, for we were old friends,–I was counsel against him in the Ogden case. Said Webster to me, “Steele, I am bothered about this speech; I have a paragraph in it which I cannot word up to my mind;” and he repeated it to me. “How would this do?” said he. “`Let us hope that the sense of unrestricted freedom may be so intertwined with the desire to preserve a connection of the several parts of the body politic, that some arrangement, more or less lasting, may prove in a measure satisfactory.’ How would that do?”