PUNCHINELLO

THE MYSTERY OF MR. E. DROOD, By ORPHEUS C. KERR, Continued in this Number.

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THE

MYSTERY OF MR. E. DROOD.

AN ADAPTATION.

BY ORPHEUS C. KERR.

CHAPTER XII—(Continued.)

The pauper burial-ground toward which they now progress in a rather high-stepping manner, or—to vary the phrase—toward which their steps are now very much bent, is not a favorite resort of the more cheerful village people after nightfall. Ask any resident of Bumsteadville if he believed in ghosts, and, if the time were mid-day and the place a crowded grocery store, he would fearlessly answer in the negative; (just the same as a Positive philosopher in cast-iron health and with no thunder shower approaching would undauntedly deny a Deity!) but if any resident of Bumsteadville should happen to be caught near the country editor's last home after dark, he would get over that part of his road in a curiously agile and flighty manner;—(just the same as a Positive philosopher with a sore throat, or at an uncommonly showy bit of lightning, would repeat "Now I lay me down to sleep," with surprising devotion.) So, although no one in all Bumsteadville was in the least afraid of the pauper burial-ground at any hour, it was not invariably selected by the great mass of the populace as a peerless place to go home by at midnight; and the two intellectual explorers find no sentimental young couples rambling arm in arm among the ghastly head-boards, nor so much as one loiterer smoking his segar on a suicide's tomb.

"JOHN McLAUGHLIN, you're getting nervous again," says Mr. BUMSTEAD, catching him in the coat collar with the handle of his umbrella and drawing the other toward him hand-over-hand. "It's about time that you should revert again to the hoary JAMES AKER'S excellent preparation for the human family.—I'll try it first, myself, to see if it tastes at all of the cork.

"Ah-h," sighs OLD MORTARITY, after his turn has come and been enjoyed at last, "that's the kind of Spirits I don't mind being a wrapper to. I could wrap them up all right."

Reflectively chewing a clove, the Ritualistic organist reclines on the pauper grave of a former writer for the daily press, and cogitates upon his companion's leaning to Spiritualism; while the other produces matches and lights their lanterns.

"Mr. McLAUGHLIN," he solemnly remarks, waving his umbrella at the graves around, "in this scene you behold the very last of man's individual being. In this entombment he ends forever. Tremble, J. McLAUGHLIN!—forever. Soul and Spirit are but unmeaning words, according to the latest big things in science. The departed Dr. DAVIS SLAVONSKI, of St. Petersburg, before setting out for the Asylum, proved, by his Atomic Theory, that men are neatly manufactured of Atoms of matter, which are continually combining together until they form Man; and then going through the process of Life, which is but the mechanical effect of their combination; and then wearing apart again by attrition into the exhaustion of cohesion called Death; and then crumbling into separate Atoms of native matter, or dust, again; and then gradually combining again, as before, and evolving another Man; and Living, and Dying, again; and so on forever. Thus, and thus only, is Man immortal. You are made exclusively of Atoms of matter, yourself, JOHN McLAUGHLIN. So am I."

"I can understand a man's believing that he, himself, is all Atoms of matter, and nothing else," responds OLD MORTARITY, skeptically.

"As how, JOHN McLAUGHLIN,—as how?"

"When he knows that, at any rate, he hasn't got one atom of common sense," is the answer.

Suddenly Mr. BUMSTEAD arises from the grave and frantically shakes hands with him.

"You're right, sir!" he says, emotionally. "You're a gooroleman, sir. The Atom of common sense was one of the Atoms that SLAVONSKI forgot all about. Let's do some skeletons now."

At the further end of the pauper burial-ground, and in the rear of the former Alms-House, once stood a building used successively as a cider-mill, a barn, and a kind of chapel for paupers. Long ago, from neglect and bad weather, the frail wooden superstructure had fallen into pieces and been gradually carted off; but a sturdy stone foundation remained underground; and, although the flooring over it had for many years been covered with debris and rank growth, so as to be undistinguishable to common eyes from the general earth around it, the great cellar still extended beneath, and, according to weird rumor, had some secret access for OLD MORTARITY, who used it as a charnel store-house for such spoils of the grave as he found in his prowlings.

To the spot thus historied the two moralists of the moonlight come now, and, with many tumbles, Mr. McLAUGHLIN removes certain artfully placed stones and rubbish, and lifts a clumsy extemporized trap-door. Below appears a ricketty old step-ladder leading into darkness.

"I heard such cries and groans down there, last Christmas Eve, as sounded worse than the Latin singing in the Ritualistic church," observes McLAUGHLIN.

"Cries and groans!" echoes Mr. BUMSTEAD, turning quite pale, and momentarily forgetting the snakes which he is just beginning to discover among the stones. "You're getting nervous again, poor wreck, and need some more West Indian cough-mixture.—Wait until I see for myself whether it's got enough sugar in it."

In due time the great nervous antidote is passed and replaced, and then, with the lighted lanterns worked around under their arms, they go down the tottering ladder. Down they go into a great, damp, musty cavern, to which their lights give a pallid illumination.

"See here," says OLD MORTARITY, raising a long, curved bone from the floor. "Look at that: shoulder-blade of unmarried Episcopal lady, aged thirty-nine."

"How do you know she was so old, and unmarried?" asks the organist.

"Because the shoulder-blade's so sharp."

Mr. Bumstead is surprised at this specimen of the art of an AGASSIZ and WATERHOUSE HAWKINS in such a mortary old man, and his intellectual pride causes him to resolve at once upon a rival display.

"Look at this skull, JOHN McLAUGHLIN," he says, referring to an object that he has found behind the ladder. "See thish fine, retreating brow, bulging chin, projecting occipital bone, and these orifices of ears that musht've been stupen'sly long. It's the skull, JOHN McLAUGHLIN, of a twin-brother of the man who really wished—really wished, JOHN McLAUGHLIN—that he could be sat'shfied, sir, in his own mind, that CHARLES DICKENS was a Christian writer."

"Why, thash's skull of a