e best-looking girls, and went into furious convulsions, so
that they could kick them in the tender places without its being
suspected that their intentions were not honorable.

During this characteristic female performance, our musical trio had not
been idle. Dennis had been busily engaged in splicing his wooden leg.
Wagstaff had seized a bucket from the disabled engine, and nearly
drowned three or four unfortunate females with dirty water from the
frog-pond. Overdale was attracted to the side of a blue-eyed girl, who
had swooned in a clean place, behind a concealing blackberry bush, and
he had rubbed the skin off her hands in his benevolent exertions to
"bring her to," and had meanwhile liberally peppered her face and neck
with gravel-stones and sand, from the stock which had accumulated in his
hair when he was first pitched into the sand-bank.

Everybody was eventually convalescent, and likely to recover from the
damage which nobody had sustained; the gentlemen had repented of the
prayers which they had not said, and were now swearing ferociously about
their fractured pocket-companions, and their broken cigars; and the
ladies were regaling each other with multitudinous accounts of
miraculous escapes from the horrible accidents which might have killed
everybody, but hadn't hurt anybody. Another engine was sent for, and the
cars ran to the end of the railroad, seventy miles, before the women
stopped talking, or the men got anything to drink.

The musical trio, whose united chorus had been so suddenly interrupted,
met at the bar of the nearest tavern for the first time since the run
off; their greeting was peculiar, but characteristic; when they came in
sight of each other, they didn't speak a word, until they solemnly
joined hands and finished the "too ral li la," which they hadn't had the
leisure to complete at the time of their sudden separation. Overdale,
true to his ruling passion, wouldn't stop when the others did, but was
going on with an extra "tooral li, looral li," when Wagstaff presented a
glass of strong brandy and water at him; the plan succeeded; he stopped
in the midst of a most astonishing shake on the first "looral," and
merely remarking, "To be continued," he yielded, a passive captive to
the fluid conqueror.

Subsequent conversations disclosed their future plans, and it was
discovered that they were all journeying to the same place, New York
city; and that their several visits had one common object