Punchinello, Volume 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870

Excerpt

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....