In the meantime the young gentlemen,
      one and all, are somewhat less piously inclined than before,
      while the landlady purchases a shilling’s worth of the Indian
      rubber, and very carefully obliterates the pencil memorandum that
      some fool has made in her great family Bible, on the broad margin
      of the Proverbs of Solomon. THE ANGEL OF THE ODD

AN EXTRAVAGANZA. It was a chilly November afternoon. I had just consummated an
      unusually hearty dinner, of which the dyspeptic _truffe_ formed
      not the least important item, and was sitting alone in the
      dining-room, with my feet upon the fender, and at my elbow a
      small table which I had rolled up to the fire, and upon which
      were some apologies for dessert, with some miscellaneous bottles
      of wine, spirit and _liqueur_. In the morning I had been reading
      Glover’s “Leonidas,” Wilkie’s “Epigoniad,” Lamartine’s
      “Pilgrimage,” Barlow’s “Columbiad,” Tuckermann’s “Sicily,” and
      Griswold’s “Curiosities”; I am willing to confess, therefore,
      that I now felt a little stupid. I made effort to arouse myself
      by aid of frequent Lafitte, and, all failing, I betook myself to
      a stray newspaper in despair. Having carefully perused the column
      of “houses to let,” and the column of “dogs lost,” and then the
      two columns of “wives and apprentices runaway,” I attacked with
      great resolution the editorial matter, and, reading it from
      beginning to end without understanding a syllable, conceived the
      possibility of its being Chinese, and so re-read it from the end
      to the beginning, but with no more satisfactory result. I was
      about throwing away, in disgust,

     “This folio of four pages, happy work
     Which not even critics criticise,”

      when I felt my attention somewhat aroused by the paragraph which
      follows:

      “The avenues to death are numerous and strange. A London paper
      mentions the decease of a person from a singular cause. He was
      playing at ‘puff the dart,’ which is played with a long needle
      inserted in some worsted, and blown at a target through a tin
      tube. He placed the needle at the wrong end of the tube, and
      drawing his breath strongly to puff the dart forward with force,
      drew the needle into his throat. It entered the lungs, and in a
      few days killed him.”

      Upon seeing this I fell into a great rage, without exactly
      knowing why. “This thing,” I exclaimed, “is a contemptible
      falsehood—a poor hoax—the lees of the invention of some pitiable
      penny-a-liner—of some wretched concoctor of accidents in
      Cocaigne. These fellows, knowing the extravagant gullibility of
      the age, set their wits to work in the imagination of improbable
      possibilities—-of odd accidents, as they term them; but to a
      reflecting intellect (like mine,” I added, in parenthesis,
      putting my forefinger unconsciously to the side of my nose,) “to
      a contemplative understanding such as I myself possess, it seems
      evident at once that the marvelous increase of late in these ‘odd
      accidents’ is by far the oddest accident of all. For my own part,
      I intend to believe nothing henceforward that has anything of the
      ‘singular’ about it.”

      “Mein Gott, den, vat a vool you bees for dat!” replied one of the
      most remarkable voices I ever heard. At first I took it for a
      rumbling in my ears—such as a man sometimes experiences when
      getting very drunk—but, upon second thought, I considered the
      sound as more nearly resembling that which proceeds from an empty
      barrel beaten with a big stick; and, in fact, this I should have
      concluded it to be, but for the articulation of the syllables and
      words. I am by no means naturally nervous, and the very few
      glasses of Lafitte which I had sipped served to embolden me no
      little, so that I felt nothing of trepidation, but merely
      uplifted my eyes with a leisurely movement, and looked carefully
      around the room for the intruder. I could not, however, perceive
      any one at all. “Humph!” resumed the voice, as I continued my survey, “you mus pe
      so dronk as de pig, den, for not zee me as I zit here at your
      zide.”

      Hereupon I bethought me of looking immediately before my nose,
      and there, sure enough, confronting me at the table sat a
      personage nondescript, although not altogether indescribable. His
      body was a wine-pipe, or a rum-puncheon, or something of that
      character, and had a truly Falstaffian air. In its nether
      extremity were inserted two kegs, which seemed to answer all the
      purposes of legs. For arms there dangled from the upper portion
      of the carcass two tolerably long bottles, with the necks outward
      for hands. All the head that I saw the monster possessed of was
      one of those Hessian canteens which resemble a large snuff-box
      with a hole in the middle of the lid. This canteen (with a funnel
      on its top, like a cavalier cap slouched over the eyes) was set
      on edge upon the puncheon, with the hole toward myself; and
      through this hole, which seemed puckered up like the mouth of a
      very precise old maid, the creature was emitting certain rumbling
      and grumbling noises which he evidently intended for intelligible
      talk. “I zay,” said he, “you mos pe dronk as de pig, vor zit dare and
      not zee me zit ere; and I zay, doo, you mos pe pigger vool as de
      goose, vor to dispelief vat iz print in de print. ’Tiz de
      troof—dat it iz—eberry vord ob it.”

      “Who are you, pray?” said I, with much dignity, although somewhat
      puzzled; “how did you get here? and what is it you are talking
      about?”

      “Az vor ow I com’d ere,” replied the figure, “dat iz none of your
      pizzness; and as vor vat I be talking apout, I be talk apout vat
      I tink proper; and as vor who I be, vy dat is de very ting I
      com’d here for to let you zee for yourzelf.”

      “You are a drunken vagabond,” said I, “and I shall ring the bell
      and order my footman to kick you into the street.”

      “He! he! he!” said the fellow, “hu! hu! hu! dat you can’t do.”

      “Can’t do!” said I, “what do you mean?—I can’t do what?”

      “Ring de pell,” he replied, attempting a grin with his little
      villanous mouth. Upon this I made an effort to get up, in order to put my threat
      into execution; but the ruffian just reached across the table
      very deliberately, and hitting me a tap on the forehead with the
      neck of one of the long bottles, knocked me back into the
      arm-chair from which I had half arisen. I was utterly astounded;
      and, for a moment, was quite at a loss what to do. In the
      meantime, he continued his talk.