The Sun.
London, England, 1860-10-30 00:00:00

(From the—SPeciaZ Correspondent of the Daily .News.)

NEW YORK, OCT. 14.
New fork is tat urn ing in sackcloth and ashes over
the tellure of the great ball. Certainly, as a fete so
long talked abair it, so long preparing, and which it
was asserted v r as intended to eclipse all other dis-
plays of the ki cad, ancient and modern, it was rather
a failure. W hen I went there it was past 1 o'clock
in the morniP tg, and even at that time, though many
had left, it IN raa too much crowded to make moving
aliout either easy or comfortable. I then heard that
the floor of ! the ballroom., which had been boarded
over the pi .t at about three feet from the ground, had
sank so rein ch in the centre as to form a large hole
and necesf3itate the introduction of carpenters to
restore it before the dancing could be commenced.
Some extiggerated the contretemps into a perfect
catastrophe, others pooh-poohed it as a thing not
worth notice. I could get no reliable information
pro or eon., 'and as the mail closed in two or three
hours from, that time I came to the most prudent
determination that I could arrive at under the cir-
camstanr;es—that of saying nothing about it till I
was sure of what really had occurred. I have since
found that it is quite true, however, that some 30
feet ?square of the floor did sink in the centre of
the parterre about three feet, forming a kind of
wooeten pond in the very space set apart for such
sianoing as the crush permitted. The whole thing,
however, though indicating a good deal of miscal-
culation on the part of those in charge of the
carpentering portion of the details, was, after all,
more a ridiculous incident than anything else,
and certainly by no means justified the " sensa-
tion " notices of it in some of the journals on
tho following day, in which what I am told was an
almost noiseless bend was spoken of as a " tre-
mendous crash," and so on. Nobody was alarmed
—half the people in the house did not know of it—
and a few carpenters repaired the whole damage in
an helur. The cause of the whole mishap was that
in the hurry with which at last the floor was con-
structed, a space of the sized square I have already
mentioned was put up without a centre crossbeam
—its main support. Even without this beam it
would have been equal to the ordinary exigencies
of dancing, only that it happened, of course, that
this Ras in the very centre of the floor,.where
everybody collected in a dense mass to see the
Prizes as he came in. Under this unusual pressure
the planks gradually bent in, and, though every-
body scrambled off them as fast as they could, the
mischief was done. The ends of all the planks
'were started ; two or three, I was informed, were
broken, on which some gentlemen and ladies were
standing, apparently immersed up to the waist In
the floor of the room. There was not the least
alarm, for, as I said, half the people in the place
did not know it had occurred, while those who did
had ocular demonstration that if the whole floor
went they would only have some three feet to fall.
Very few could help laughing at the affair, always
excepting the Committee of Management, who were
perfectly crest-fallen and seemed bitterly annoyed.
New York will never forgive them or forget this
mishap, though really it was only an item, and
comparatively speaking a very slight item, in the
causes which made the fete a failure, and led to its
anfavourable contrast with similar festivals in the