JQuery :: Loading Content And Appending To A Div?

I can load content and update a <div> using the following code:

var auto_refresh = setInterval(
function()
{
$('#loaddiv').fadeOut('slow').load('mypage.html').fadeIn("slow");
}, 5000);
<div id="loaddiv"></div>

However what I would like to do is load the html into a variable and then append it to the <div>. Looking through the forums I see people have suggested using get instead of load. However when I use $.get there is nothing in the responseText or responseXML.

So how can I load my html into a variable, and then append the contents of the variable to my div?