ound my friend Alfred shaking
me by the arm to make me get up.

"Oh, you everlasting sleeper! Must I have you carried out into the
middle of the street, and fireworks exploded in your ears? It is
afternoon. Don't you recollect your promise to take me with you to see
M. Aguado's Spanish pictures?"

"God! I forgot all, all about it," I answered, dressing myself
hurriedly. "We will go there at once. I have the permit lying there on
my desk."

I started to find it, but fancy my astonishment when I beheld, instead
of the mummy's foot I had purchased the evening before, the little
green paste idol left in its place by the Princess Hermonthis!

IV

MR. BLOKE'S ITEM[1]

Mark Twain

[1] Written about 1865.

Our esteemed friend, Mr. John William Bloke, of Virginia City, walked
into the office where we are sub-editor at a late hour last night, with
an expression of profound and heartfelt suffering upon his countenance,
and, sighing heavily, laid the following item reverently upon the desk,
and walked slowly out again. He paused a moment at the door, and seemed
struggling to command his feelings sufficiently to enable him to speak,
and then, nodding his head toward his manuscript, ejaculated in a
broken voice, "Friend of mine--oh! how sad!" and burst into tears. We
were so moved at his distress that we did not think to call him back
and endeavour to comfort him until he was gone, and it was too late.
The paper had already gone to press, but knowing that our friend would
consider the publication of this item important, and cherishing the
hope that to print it would afford a melancholy satisfaction to his
sorrowing heart, we stopped the press at once and inserted it in our
columns:

DISTRESSING ACCIDENT.--Last evening, about six o'clock, as Mr.
William Schuyler, an old and respectable citizen of South Park, was
leaving his residence to go downtown, as has been his usual custom
for many years with the exception only of a short interval in the
spring of 1850, during which he was confined to his bed by injuries
received in attempting to stop a runaway horse by thoughtlessly
placing himself directly in its wake and throwing up his hands and
shouting, which if he had done so even a single moment sooner, must
inevitably have frightened the animal still more instead of
checking its speed, although disastrous enough to himself as it
was, and rendered more melancholy and d