Punchinello, Volume 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870

Excerpt

THE MYSTERY OF MR. E. DROOD.

AN ADAPTATION.

BY ORPHEUS C. KERR.

CHAPTER XV.

"SPOTTED."

When the bell of St. Cow's began ringing for Ritualistic morning-service, with a sound as of some incontinently rambling dun spinster of the lacteal herd—now near at hand in cracked dissonance, as the wind blows hither; now afar, in tinkling distance, as the wind blows hence—MONTGOMERY PENDRAGON was several miles away from Bumsteadville upon his walking-match, with head already bumped like a pineapple, and face curiously swelled, from amateur practice with the Indian Club. Being by that time cold enough for breakfast, and willing to try the virtues of some soothing application to his right eye, which, from a bruise just below it, was nearly closed, the badly banged young man suspended his murderous calisthenics at the door of a rustic hotel, and there entered to secure a wayside meal.

The American country "hotel," or half-way house, is, perhaps, one of the most depressing fictions ever encountered by stage-passenger, or pedestrian afield: and depends so exclusively upon the imagination for any earthly distinction from the retired and neglected private hiding-place of some decayed and morbid agricultural family, that only the conventional swing sign-board before the door saves the cognizant mind from a painfully dense confusion. Smelling about equally of eternal wash-day, casual cow-shed, and passing feather-bed, it sustains a lank, middle-aged, gristly man to come out at the same hour every day and grunt unintelligibly at the stage-driver, an expressionless boy in a bandless straw-hat and no shoes to stare blankly from the doorway at the same old pole-horse he has mechanically thus inspected from infancy, and one speckled hen of mature years to poise observingly on single leg at the head of the shapeless black dog asleep at the sunny end of the low wooden stoop. It is the one rural spot on earth where a call for fresh eggs evokes remonstrative and chronic denial; where chickens for dinner are sternly discredited as mere freaks of legendary romance, and an order for a glass of new milk is incredulously answered by a tumblerful of water which tastes of whitewash-brush. Whosoever sleeps there of a night shall be crowded by walls which rub off into a faint feather-bed of the flavor and consistency of geese used whole, and have for his feverish breakfast in the morning a version of broiled ham as racy of attic-salt as the rasher of BACON'S essays. And to him who pays his bill there, ere he straggles weakly forth to repair his shattered health by frenzied flight, shall be given in change such hoary ten-cent shreds of former postal currency as he has not hitherto deemed credible, sticking together in inextricable conglomeration by such fragments of fish-scales as he never before believed could be gathered by handled small-money from palms not sufficiently washed after piscatorial diversion.

It was in at a country hotel, then, that the young Southern pedestrian turned for temporary rest and a meal, and pitiless was the cross-examination instituted by the inevitable lank, middle-aged gristly man, before he could reconcile it with his duty as a cautious public character to reveal the treasures of the larder....