paused terribly before him with hand hidden in breast, Mr. BUMSTEAD placed his lantern upon a step of the ladder, drew and profoundly labiated his antique black bottle, thoughtfully crunched a couple of cloves from another pocket—staring stonily all the while—and then addressed the youthful shade:—

"Where's th' umbrella?"

"Monster of forgetfulness! murderer of memory!" spoke the spirit, sternly. "In this, the last rough resting place of the impecunious dead, do you dare to discuss commonplace topics with one of the departed? Look at me, uncle, clove-befogged, and shrink appalled from the dread sight, and pray for mercy."

"Ishthis prop'r language t' address-t'-y'r-relative?" inquired Mr. BUMSTEAD, in a severely reproachful manner.

"Relative!" repeated the apparition, sepulchrally. "What sort of relative is he, who, when his sister's orphaned son is sleeping at his feet, conveys the unconscious orphan, head downward, through a midnight tempest, to a place like this, and leaves him here, and then forgets where he has put him?"

"I give't up," said the organist, after a moment's consideration.

"The answer is: he's a dead-beat." continued the young ghost, losing his temper. "And what, JOHN BUMSTEAD, did you do with my oroide watch and other jewels?"

"Musht've spilt'm on the road here," returned the musing uncle, faintly remembering that they had been found upon the turnpike, shortly after Christmas, by Gospeler SIMPSON. "Are you dead, EDWIN?"

"Did you not bury me here alive, and close the opening to my tomb, and go away and charge everybody with my murder?" asked the spectre, bitterly. "O, uncle, hard of head and paralyzed in recollection! is it any good excuse for sacrificing my poor life, that, in your cloven state, you put me down a cellar, like a pan of milk, and then could not remember where you'd put me? And was it noble, then, to go to her whom you supposed had been my chosen bride, and offer wedlock to her on your own account?"

"I was acting as y'r-executor, EDWIN," explained the uncle. "I did ev'thing forth' besht."

"And does the sight of me fill you with no terror, no remorse, unfeeling man?" groaned the ghost.

"Yeshir," answered Mr. BUMSTEAD, with sudden energy. "Yeshir. I'm r'morseful on 'count of th' umbrella. Who-d'-y'-lend-'t-to?"

It is an intellectual characteristic of the more advanced degrees of the clove-trance, that, while the tranced individual can perceive objects, even to occasional duplexity, and hear remarks more or less distinctly, neither objects nor remarks are positively associated by him with any perspicuous idea. Thus, while the Ritualistic organist had a blurred perception of his nephew's conversational remains, and was dimly conscious that the tone of the supernatural remarks addressed to himself was not wholly congratulatory, he still presented a physical and moral aspect of dense insensibility.

Momentarily nonplussed by such unheard-of calmness under a ghostly visitation, the apparition, without changing position, allowed itself to roll one inquiring eye towards the opening above the step-ladder, where the moonlight revealed an attentive head of red hair. Catching the glance, the head allowed a hand belonging to it to appear at the opening and motion downward.

"Look there, then," said the intelligent ghost to its uncle, pointing to the ground near its feet.

Mr. BUMSTEAD, rousing from a brief doze, glanced indifferently towards the spot indicated; but, in another instant, was on his knees beside the undefined object he there beheld. A keen, breathless scrutiny, a frenzied clutch with both hands, and then he was upon his feet again, holding close to the lantern the thing he had found.

The barred light shone on a musty skeleton, to which still clung a few mouldy shreds left by the rats; and only the celebrated bone handle identified it as what had once been the maddened finder's idolized Alpaca Umbrella.

"Aha!" twitted the apparition, "then you have some heart left, JOHN BUMSTEAD?"

"Heart!" moaned the distracted organist, fairly kissing the dear remains, and restored to perfect speech and comprehension by the awful shock. "I had one, but it is broken now!—Allie, my long-lost Allie!" he continued, tenderly apostrophizing the skeleton, "do we meet thus at last again?—

Where is thine old familiar alpaca dress, my Allie? Where is the canopy that has so often sheltered thy poor master's head from the storm? Gone! gone! and through my own forgetfulness!"

"And have you no thought for your nephew?" asked the persevering apparition, hoarsely.

"Not under the present circumstances," retorted the mourner; he and the ghost both coughing with the colds which they had taken from standing still so long in such a damp place—"not under the present circumstances," he repeated, wildly, making a fierce pass at the spectre with the skeleton, and then dropping the latter to the ground in nerveless despair. "To a single man, his umbrella is wife, mother, sister, venerable maiden aunt from the country—all in one. In losing mine, I've lost my whole family, and want to hear no more about relatives. Good night, sir."

"Here! hold on! Can't you leave the lantern for a moment?" cried the ghost. But the heart-stricken Ritualist had swarmed up the ladder and was gone.

Then, going up too, the spectre appeared also unto two other men, who crawled from behind pauper headstones at his summons; the face of the one being that of J. MCLAUGHLIN, that of the other Mr. TRACY CLEWS. And the spectre walked between these two, carrying Mr. BUMSTEAD'S skeleton in its hand.^[1]

[1]      The cut accompanying the above chapter is from the illustrated title-page of the English monthly numbers of "The Mystery of Edwin Drood;"—in which it is the last of a series of border-vignettes;—and plainly shows that it was the author's intention to bring back his hero a living man before the conclusion of the story.

ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS.

Bibo.—Is there a champagne wine having the flavor of gun-flints?
Answer.—The wine made at Pierry, in the Champagne country, is said by connoisseurs to be so flavored. There is much alarm now among the wine-growers, however, lest the next vintage may have a flavor of percussion-caps instead, owing to the war and the modern weapons.

Plantagenet de Vere.—Would you believe a person named JONES on his oath?
Answer.—We would not.

Smike. We read of houses being "gutted" by the Prussian soldiers; have houses entrails, then?
Answer.—All occupied houses have livers, and most houses have lights.

M. T. Head.—We cannot pay strangers in advance for contributions that have not been sent in by them.

Icarus.—What do the balloon scouts of Paris use for ballast?
Answer.—Bundles of newspapers, chiefly. Immense bales of the unsold copies of the New York Free Press are now exported for the purpose. They are preferred to any other papers because, when placed anywhere in the balloon, they Lie so, and, having already fallen from grace, falling from a balloon is nothing to them.

Taxidermist.—What is the best material for stuffing ballot-boxes with?
Answer.—Greenbacks.

Leatherhead.—Is it true that most of the prominent men of England—"TOM BROWN" HUGHES, for instance—are proficient pugilists?
Answer.—We have never seen "TOM BROWN" spar, but we have often seen JOHN STUART Mill.

Abby Gansevoort.—No, my dear, your name does not occur in any of SHAKESPEARE'S plays.

Figdrum.—Born to the drudgery of commerce, I aspire to literature: what am I to do to see my name in print?
Answer.—Put it in the City Directory.

Voice-in-the-Fog.—Why is it that all the queer isms of the day, such as socialism, are more cultivated by Red Republicans than by any other political sect?
Answer.—Red, as artists well know, is the complementary or opposite color to green. The social phenomenon to which you refer, then, may be accounted for on the principle that extremes meet.

Clericus.—Is it proper for me, as a clergyman, to wear moustaches?
Answer.—Quite so, unless they are red, in which case they might interfere with your published sermons.

Astrolabe.—What is the exact distance between the Dog Star and Roxbury, Mass.?
Answer.—We do not know. PUNCHINELLO is not a Sirius journal.

Juniper Byles.—My rent has just been raised, and I have had a curtain-lecture from my wife for swearing about it. Would not you swear if your rent was raised?
Answer.—Certainly not—at least not if it was raised by benevolent subscription.

AN ACQUAINTANCE.

Tom.—"I say, JACK, what a beautiful complexion Miss SMITH has. Do you know her?"

Jack.—"No, but I know a girl who buys her complexion at the same store at which Miss SMITH buys hers."

"CUM GRANO SALIS."—Musk-melon.

A HORSE-CAR CONTINGENCY.

Gallant Tar (To horrified lady of uncertain age), "BELAY THERE, OLD WOMAN! TAKE THIS SEAT."

OUR PORTFOLIO.

PARIS, FOURTH WEEK OF THE REPUBLIC, 1870.

Dear Punchinello: You may not have heard that BISMARCK has been here, had an interview with FAVRE, and is off again. I didn't suppose you would know it, so I hasten to give you and your army of readers a brief synopsis of what took place, as nearly as I can in the exact language used by the distinguished diplomats upon the occasion.

The scene of the consultation was one of the Imperial wine-cellars under that pavilion of the Tuileries palace which overlooks the Seine at the southwestern extremity of the Place du Carrousel. The spot was selected for two reasons: it was far removed from the noise and hubbub of the city, and it furnished facilities for "liquoring up" in case of necessity. I was there and left, as you will see, under circumstances calculated to give me a lasting impression of the event. We all three of us sat around a pine table, upon which faintly flickered a tallow candle in a soda-water bottle, that shed around a sickly glare (that is to say, the candle did). BISMARCK looked a little the worse for wear, I thought, and, as he unbuttoned his vest with a grunt of relief, he struck me likewise as being rather short in his wind.

FAVRE was loose and frisky as a four weeks old kitten, and spoke with a quick, decided tone that reminded me of HORACE GREELEY. He never once swore, however, during the whole interview. Your readers will observe that even if this momentous meeting was not marked by the usual diplomatic usages, the language is strictly according to the usual diplomatic idiom. It is important to note this fact, as everything hinges on the "idiom."

BISMARCK was the first to break silence:

"The difficulties which embarrass the questions under discussion stand first in the order of elimination."

FAVRE assented, and BISMARCK continued: "We must remove the peritoneum to get at the viscera of the issues (I was much struck with the force and originality of this method of putting it), and evict those impressions which are purely matters of national sensibility."

I snuffed the candle and waited for FAVRE.

FAVRE: "Your Excellency abounds in subtle diagnoses."

BISMARCK: "It is not a question of noses."

FAVRE: "Your Excellency mistakes me. I meant to say that, like the 'Heathen Chinee,' your ways are dark."

I moved the light closer to the Count. FAVRE only smiled.

BISMARCK: "Touching 'rectification,' then, Germany sticks to her position."

I regarded this as an insinuation that somebody was "stuck."

FAVRE: "France adheres unalterably to her previous resolution. National traditions, deeply interwoven with the fine fibre of individual natures, forbid the relaxation of tissues logically irresistible."

A smile of triumph flitted faintly o'er the features of the Frenchman. He evidently thought he had made a "ten strike." I whispered approvingly, "Tres bien, Monsieur, tres bien!"

BISMARCK: "Does the German heart yearn for the Rhine? Does it yearn for Strasbourg? Does it yearn for Metz? and if not, what does it yearn for?"

He was looking straight at me when he said this, and so I answered "Bier."

A dark scowl flitted frantically over the features of the German, but he went right on: "Are all the longings of all these years, dating from the birth of CHARLEMAGNE and extending through GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS to FREDERICK the Great and WILLIAM the First, by his father on his maternal grandmother's side, who lies in the iron coffin of the domkirche at Potsdam, whence we derive the consolidated grandeur of HOHENZOLLERN mingling its rich ancestral dyes with the dark woof of fate to dispel the expanding dream of German aspiration?"

I had not time to witness the effect upon FAVRE, but, gasping for breath, I started from my seat and uttered these words, which I remembered to have read in a German-English libretto of MARIE STUART: "Mein Gott, ich kenne eures Eifers reinen Trieb, Weiss, dass gediegne Weissheit aus Euch redet!"

It did not matter to me that FAVRE lay swooning on the floor. That the Count glared at me savagely and crunched his jaws with maniacal energy. My knowledge of German was up. It had caught the fierce impulse, the majestic sweep of his ponderous linguosity. I remembered another sentence, and hurled it wildly at him: "Bei Gott, Du wirst, ich hoff's, noch viele Jahre auf ihrem Grabe wandeln, ohne dass du selber sie hinabzustürzen brauchtest!"

Again I looked at the Count. His jaw had ceased working, and the expression of his eye had changed. His arm moved furtively beneath the table. What could he be doing? Horrible moment of uncertainty. Still the arm worked, as if tugging at something. I could stand it no longer. Seizing the soda-water bottle, I stooped to cast the rays of the sixpenny dip beneath the table. As I did so, a boot-heel flashed in the air, the Count's arm descended with a terrific detonation, and I saw no more.

(Interval of twenty-four hours.)

The result of the interview will be communicated to the American public by a Tribune special, as soon as a carrier-pigeon can reach SMALLEY at London. I am still suffering from a sensation of having been recently hit,

DICK TINTO.

ASPIRATION.

Of all sorts of people in the world, the Cockney has the queerest notions about vegetable nature. Show him the first letter of the alphabet, for instance, and he pronounces it "hay."

APPARENTLY ANOMALOUS.

Should the Prussians ever succeed in entering Paris, it is hardly possible that they can be well received by the citizens, whether they find FAVRE there or not.

OUR PRIVATE GALLERIES.

The Belmont Collection.

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