h
intoxicated to do duty, now sprang all at once to their feet and to
their instruments, and, scrambling upon their table, broke out, with one
accord, into, "Yankee Doodle," which they performed, if not exactly
in tune, at least with an energy superhuman, during the whole of the
uproar.

Meantime, upon the main dining-table, among the bottles and glasses,
leaped the gentleman who, with such difficulty, had been restrained from
leaping there before. As soon as he fairly settled himself, he commenced
an oration, which, no doubt, was a very capital one, if it could
only have been heard. At the same moment, the man with the teetotum
predilection, set himself to spinning around the apartment, with immense
energy, and with arms outstretched at right angles with his body; so
that he had all the air of a tee-totum in fact, and knocked everybody
down that happened to get in his way. And now, too, hearing an
incredible popping and fizzing of champagne, I discovered at length,
that it proceeded from the person who performed the bottle of that
delicate drink during dinner. And then, again, the frog-man croaked
away as if the salvation of his soul depended upon every note that he
uttered. And, in the midst of all this, the continuous braying of a
donkey arose over all. As for my old friend, Madame Joyeuse, I really
could have wept for the poor lady, she appeared so terribly perplexed.
All she did, however, was to stand up in a corner, by the
fireplace, and sing out incessantly at the top of her voice,
"Cock-a-doodle-de-dooooooh!"

And now came the climax--the catastrophe of the drama. As no resistance,
beyond whooping and yelling and cock-a-doodling, was offered to the
encroachments of the party without, the ten windows were very speedily,
and almost simultaneously, broken in. But I shall never forget the
emotions of wonder and horror with which I gazed, when, leaping
through these windows, and down among us pele-mele, fighting, stamping,
scratching, and howling, there rushed a perfect army of what I took to
be Chimpanzees, Ourang-Outangs, or big black baboons of the Cape of Good
Hope.

I received a terrible beating--after which I rolled under a sofa and
lay still. After lying there some fifteen minutes, during which time I
listened with all my ears to what was going on in the room, I came to
same satisfactory denouement of this tragedy. Monsieur Maillard, it
appeared, in giving me the account of the lunatic who had excited his