"What in the name of all the witches of Salem has got into that
piano!" cried Mr. Burleigh, bursting into the parlor from the
office, with his pen stuck behind his ear, and his hair brushed
up perpendicularly. "There's sorcery in the air. I'm practised
upon--Keep still? No, not if I was nailed up in one of the
soldier's 'wooden overcoats.' The world is transformed, transfigured,
transmogrified, and 'things are not what they seem!' Here's
a blooming girl who'll dance with me," and he seized the hand of
a white-haired old lady who yielded to the contagion so far as to
take a place in the line beside her granddaughter.

Indeed, in a few moments, all who had been familiar with the pastime
in their youth, caught the joyous infection, and lengthened out
the lines, each new accession being greeted with shouts and laughter.

The scene approached in character that described by Hawthorne
as occurring in the grounds of the Villa Borghese when Donatello,
with a simple "tambourine," produced music of such "indescribably
potency" that sallow, haggard, half-starved peasants, French soldiers,
scarlet-costumed contadinas, Swiss guards, German artists, English
lords, and herdsmen from the Campagna, all "joined hands in the
dance" which the musician himself led with the frisky, frolicsome
step of the mythical faun.

In the latter instance it was a contagious, mad excitement easily
possible among hot-blooded people and wandering pleasure-seekers,
the primal laws of whose being are impulse and passion. That the
joyous exhilaration which filled Mr. Burleigh's parlor was akin
to the wild, half pagan frenzy that the great master of fiction