Punchinello, Volume 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870

Excerpt

THE MYSTERY OF MR. E. DROOD.

AN ADAPTATION.

BY ORFHEUS C. KERR

CHAPTER XIX.

THE H. AND H. OF J. BUMSTEAD.

The exquisitely sweet month of the perfectly delicious summer-vacation having come, Miss CAROWTHERS' Young Ladies have returned again, for a time, to their respective homes, MAGNOLIA PENDRAGON has gone to the city and her brother, and FLORA POTTS is ridiculously and absurdly alone.

Under the ardent sun of August, Bumsteadville slowly bakes, like an ogre's family-dish of stuffed cottages and greens, with here and there some slowly moving object, like a loose vegetable on a sluggish current of tidal gravy, and the spire of the Ritualistic church shooting-up at one end like an incorrigibly perpendicular leg of magnified mutton.

Hotter and hotter comes the breath fiery of nature's cookery, until some of the stuffing boils out of one cottage, in the shape of the Oldest Inhabitant, who makes his usual annual remark, that this is the Warmest Day in ninety-eight years, and then simmers away to some cooler nook amongst the greens. More and more intolerably quivers the atmosphere of the sylvan oven with stifling fervency, until there oozes from beneath the shingled crust of a vegetarian country-boarding-house a parboiled guest from the City, who, believing himself almost ready to turn, drifts feebly to where the roads fork and there is a shade more dun; while, to the speculative mind, each glowing field of corn, or buckwheat, is an incipient Meal, and each chimney, or barn, a mere temptation to guess how many Swallows there may be in it.

Upon the afternoon of such a day as this, Miss POTTS is informed, by a servant, that Mr. BUMSTEAD has arrived, and, sending her his love, would be pleased to have her come down stairs to him and bring him a fan.

"Why didn't you tell him I wasn't at home, you absurd thing?" cries the young girl, hurriedly practicing a series of agitated looks and pensive smiles before her mirror.

"So I did, Miss," answers the attached menial, "but he'd seen you looking at him with an opera-glass as he came up the path, and said that he could hear you taking a clean handkerchief out of tho drawer, on purpose to receive him with, before he'd got to the door."

"Oh, what shall I do? My hands are so red to-day!" sighs FLCKA, holding her arms above her head, that the blood may retire from the too pinkish members.

After a pause, and an adjustment of a curl over her right eye and the scarf at her waist, to make them look innocent, she yields to the meteorological mania so strikingly prevalent amongst all the other characters of this narrative, and says that she will receive the visitor in the yard, near the pump. Then, casting carelessly over her shoulder that web-like shawl without which no woman nor spider is complete, she arranges her lips in the glass for the last time, and, with a garden-hat hanging from the elbow latest singed, goes down, humming un-suspiciously, into the open-air, with the guileless bearing of one wholly unprepared for company.

Resting an elbow upon a low iron patent-pump, near a rustic seat, the Ritualistic organist, in his vast linen coat and imposing straw hat, looks not unlike an eccentric garden statue, upon which some prudish slave of modern conventionalities has placed the summer attire of a western editor....