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| Room No. 11, NEW YORK. |
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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 light