air out of my whiskers.

"'Cuckoo, cuckoo!' shouted one; 'Bow-wow-wow!' roared another; 'Phiz!' went
a third; and in an instant, such a scene of commotion and riot ensued.
Plates, dishes, knives, forks, and decanters flew right and left; every
one pitched into his neighbor with the most fearful cries, and hell itself
seemed broke loose. The hour-glass and the Moulah of Oude had got me down
and were pummelling me to death, when a short, thickset man came on all
fours slap down upon them shouting out, 'Way, make way for the royal Bengal
tiger!' at which they both fled like lightning, leaving me to the encounter
single-handed. Fortunately, however, this was not of very long duration,
for some well-disposed Christians pulled him from off me; not, however,
before he had seized me in his grasp, and bitten off a portion of my left
ear, leaving me, as you see, thus mutilated for the rest of my days."

"What an extraordinary club," broke in the doctor.

"Club, sir, club! it was a lunatic asylum. The general was no other than
the famous Dr. Andrew Moorville, that had the great madhouse at Bangor, and
who was in the habit of giving his patients every now and then a kind of
country party; it being one remarkable feature of their malady that when
one takes to his peculiar flight, whatever it be, the others immediately
take the hint and go off at score. Hence my agreeable adventure: the Bengal
tiger being a Liverpool merchant, and the most vivacious madman in England;
while the hour-glass and the Moulah were both on an experimental tour to
see whether they should not be pronounced totally incurable for life."

"And Isabella?" inquired Power.

"Ah, poor Isabella had been driven mad by a card-playing aunt at Bath, and
was in fact the most hopeless case there. The last words I heard her speak
confirmed my mournful impression of her case,--

"'Yes,' said she, as they removed her to her carriage, 'I must, indeed,
have but a weak intellect, when I could have taken the nephew of a
Manchester cotton-spinner, with a face like a printed calico, for a trump
card, and the best in the pack!'"

Poor Sparks uttered these last words with a faltering accent, and finishing
his glass at one draught withdrew without wishing us good-night.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

THE SKIPPER.

In such like gossipings passed our days away, for our voyage itself had
nothing of adventure or incident to break its dull monotony; save some few
hours of calm, we had