Chapter XIX: The H. and H. of J. Bumstead

The exquisitely sweet month of the perfectly delicious summer-vacation having come, Miss CAROWTHERS' Young Ladies have returned again, for a time, to their respective homes, MAGNOLIA PENDRAGON has gone to the city and her brother, and FLORA POTTS is ridiculously and absurdly alone.

Under the ardent sun of August, Bumsteadville slowly bakes, like an ogre's family-dish of stuffed cottages and greens, with here and there some slowly moving object, like a loose vegetable on a sluggish current of tidal gravy, and the spire of the Ritualistic church shooting-up at one end like an incorrigibly perpendicular leg of magnified mutton.

Hotter and hotter comes the breath fiery of nature's cookery, until some of the stuffing boils out of one cottage, in the shape of the Oldest Inhabitant, who makes his usual annual remark, that this is the Warmest Day in ninety-eight years, and then simmers away to some cooler nook amongst the greens. More and more intolerably quivers the atmosphere of the sylvan oven with stifling fervency, until there oozes from beneath the shingled crust of a vegetarian country-boarding-house a parboiled guest from the City, who, believing himself almost ready to turn, drifts feebly to where the roads fork and there is a shade more dun; while, to the speculative mind, each glowing field of corn, or buckwheat, is an incipient Meal, and each chimney, or barn, a mere temptation to guess how many Swallows there may be in it.

Upon the afternoon of such a day as this, Miss POTTS is informed, by a servant, that Mr. BUMSTEAD has arrived, and, sending her his love, would be pleased to have her come down stairs to him and bring him a fan.

"Why didn't you tell him I wasn't at home, you absurd thing?" cries the young girl, hurriedly practicing a series of agitated looks and pensive smiles before her mirror.

"So I did, Miss," answers the attached menial, "but he'd seen you looking at him with an opera-glass as he came up the path, and said that he could hear you taking a clean handkerchief out of tho drawer, on purpose to receive him with, before he'd got to the door."

"Oh, what shall I do? My hands are so red to-day!" sighs FLCKA, holding her arms above her head, that the blood may retire from the too pinkish members.

After a pause, and an adjustment of a curl over her right eye and the scarf at her waist, to make them look innocent, she yields to the meteorological mania so strikingly prevalent amongst all the other characters of this narrative, and says that she will receive the visitor in the yard, near the pump. Then, casting carelessly over her shoulder that web-like shawl without which no woman nor spider is complete, she arranges her lips in the glass for the last time, and, with a garden-hat hanging from the elbow latest singed, goes down, humming un-suspiciously, into the open-air, with the guileless bearing of one wholly unprepared for company.

Resting an elbow upon a low iron patent-pump, near a rustic seat, the Ritualistic organist, in his vast linen coat and imposing straw hat, looks not unlike an eccentric garden statue, upon which some prudish slave of modern conventionalities has placed the summer attire of a western editor. The great heat of the sun upon his back makes him irritable, and when Miss POTTS sharply smites with her fan the knuckles of the hand which he has affably extended to take her by the chin, more than the usual symptoms of acute inflammation appear at the end of his nose, and he blows hurriedly upon his wounded digits.

"That hurt like the mischief!" he remarks, in some anger. "I don't know when I've felt anything smart so."

"Then don't be so horrid," returns the pensive girl, taking a seat before him upon the rustic settee, and abstractedly arranging her dress so that only two-thirds of a gaiter-boot can be seen.

Munching cloves, the aroma of which ladens the air all around him, Mr. BUMSTEAD contemplates her with a calmness which would be enthralling, but for the nervous twisting of his features under the torments of a singularly adhesive fly.

"I have come, dear," he observes, slowly, "to know how soon you will be ready for me to give you your next music-lesson?"

"I prefer that you would not call me your 'dear,'" was the chilling answer.

The organist thinks for a moment, and then nods his head intelligently. "You are right," he says, gravely, "--there _might_ be somebody listening who could not enter into our real feelings. And now, how about those music-lessons?"

"I don't want any more, thank you," says FLORA, coldly. "While we are all in mourning for our poor, dear absurd EDDY, it seems like a perfectly ridiculous mockery to be practicing the scales."

Fanning himself with his straw hat, Mr. BUMSTEAD shakes his bushy head several times. "You do not discriminate sufficiently," he replies. "There are kinds of music which, when performed rapidly upon the violin, fife, or kettle-drum, certainly fill the mind with sentiments unfavorable to the deeper anguish of human sorrow. Of such, however, is not the kind made by young girls, which is at all times a help to the intensity of judicious grief. Let me assure you, with the candor of an idolized friend, that some of the saddest hours of my life have been spent in teaching you to try to sing a humorous aria from DONIZETTI; and the moments in which I have most sincerely regretted ever having been born were those in which you have played, in my hearing, the Drinking-song from _La Traviata_. Believe me, then, my devoted pupil, there can be nothing at all inconsistent with a prevalence of profound melancholy in your continued piano-playing; whereas, on the contrary, your sudden and permanent cessation might at least surprise your friends and the neighborhood into a light-heartedness temporarily oblivious of the memory of that dear, missing boy, to whom you could not, I hear, give the love already bestowed upon me."

"I loved him ridiculously, absurdly, with my whole heart," cries FLORA, not altogether liking what she has heard. "I'm real sorry, too, that they think somebody has killed him."

Mr, BUMSTEAD folds his brown linen arms as he towers before her, and the dark circles around his eyes appear to shrink with the intensify of his gaze.

"There are occasions in life," he remarks, "when to acknowledge that our last meeting with a friend, who has since mysteriously disappeared, was to reject him and imply a preference for his uncle, may be calculated to associate us unpleasantly with that disappearance, in the minds of the censorious, and invite suspicions tending to our early cross-examination by our Irish local magistrate. I do not say, of course, that you actually destroyed my nephew for fear he should try to prejudice me against you; but I cannot withhold my earnest approval of your judicious pretence of a sentiment palpably incompatible with the shedding of the blood of its departed object. If you will move your dress a little, so that I can sit beside you and allow your head to rest upon my shoulder, that fan will do for both of us, and we may converse in whispers."

"My head upon _your_ shoulder!" exclaims Miss POTTS, staring swiftly about to see if anybody is looking. "I prefer to keep my head upon my own shoulders, sir."

"Two heads are better than one," the Ritualistic organist reminds her. "If a little hair-oil and powder _does_ come off upon my coat, the latter will wash, I suppose. Come, dearest, if it is our fate to never get through this hot day alive, let us be sunstruck together."

She shrinks timidly from the brown linen arm which he begins insinuating along the back of the rustic settee, and tells him that she couldn't have believed that he could be so absurd. He draws back his arm, and seems hurt.

"FLORA," he says, tenderly, "how beautiful you are, especially when fixed up. The more I see of yon, the less sorry I am that I have concluded to be yours. All the time that my dear boy was trying to induce you to relase him from his engagement, I was thinking how much better you might do; yet, beyond an occasional encouraging wink, I never gave the least sign of reciprocating your attachment. I did not think it would be right"

The assertion, though superficially true, is so imperfect in its delineation of habitual conduct liable to another construction, that the agitated Flowerpot returns, with quick indignation, "your arm was always reaching out whenever you sat in a chair anywhere near me, and whenever I sang you always kept looking straight into my mouth until it tickled me. You know you did, you hateful thing! Besides, it wasn't you that I preferred, at all; it was--oh, it's too ridiculous to tell!"

In her bashful confusion she is about to arise and trip shyly away from him into the house, when he speaks again.

"Miss POTTS, is your friendship for Miss PENDRAGON and her brother such, that their execution upon some Friday of next month would be a spectacle to which you could give no pleased attention?"

"What do you mean, you absurd creature?"

"I mean," continues Mr. BUMSTEAD, "simply this: you know my double loss. You know that, upon the person of the male PENDRAGON was found an apple looking and tasting like one which my nephew once had. You know, that when Miss PENDRAGON went from here she wore an alpaca waist which looked as though it had been exposed more than once to the rain.--See the point?"

FLORA gives a startled look, and says: "I don't see it."

"Suppose," he goes on--"suppose that I go to a magistrate, and say: 'Judge, I voted for you, and can influence a large foreign vote for you again. I have lost a nephew who was very fond of apples, and a black alpaca umbrella of great value. A young Southerner, who has not lived in this State long enough to vote, has been found in possession of an apple singularly like the kind generally eaten by my missing relative, and his sister has come out in a waist made of second-hand alpaca?'--See the point now?"

"Mr. BUMSTEAD," exclaims FLORA, affrighted by the terrible menace of his manner, "I don't any more believe that Mr. PENDRAGON is guilty than I, myself, am; and as for your old umbrella--"

"Stop, woman!" interrupted the bereaved organist, imperiously. "Not even your lips shall speak disrespectfully of my lost bone-handled friend. By a chain of unanswerable argument, I have shown you that I hold the fate of your southern acquaintances in my hands, and shall be particularly sorry if you force me to hang Mr. PENDRAGON as a rival."

FLORA puts her hands to her temples, to soothe her throbbing head and display a bracelet.

"Oh, what shall I do! I don't want anybody to be hung! It must be so perfectly awful!"

Her touching display of generous feeling does not soften him. On the contrary, he stands more erect, and smiles rather triumphantly under his straw hat.

"Beloved one," he murmurs, in a rich voice, "I find that I cannot induce you to make the first advance toward the mutual avowal we are both longing for, and must therefore precipitate our happiness myself. My poor boy would not have given you perfect satisfaction, and your momentary liking for the male PENDRAGON was but the effect of a temporary despair undoubtedly produced by my seeming coldness. That coldness had nothing to do with my heart, but resulted partially from my habit of wearing a wet towel on my head. I now propose to you--"

"Propose to me?" ejaculates Miss POTTS, with heightened color.

"--That you pick out a worthy man belonging to your own section of the Union," he continues hastily. "Here's my Heart," he adds, going through the motions of taking something from a pocket and placing it in his outstretched palm, "and here's my Hand,"--placing therein an equally imaginary object from another pocket.--"Try the H. and H. of J. BUMSTEAD."

His manner is as though he were commending some patent article of unquestionable utility.

"But I can't bear the sight of you!" she cries, pushing away the brown linen arm coming after her again.

Taking away her fan, he pats her on the head with it, and seems momentarily surprised at the hollow sound.

"Future Mrs. BUMSTEAD," he cheerfully replies, at last, "my observation and knowledge of the women of America teach me that there never was a wife going to Indiana for a divorce, who had not at first sworn to love, as well as honor and obey, her husband. Such is woman that if she had felt and said at the altar that she couldn't bear the sight of him, it wouldn't have been in the power of masculine brutality and dissipated habits to drive her from his side through all their lives. There can be no better sign of our future happiness, than for you to say, beforehand, that you utterly detest the man of your choice."

There is something terrible to the young girl in the original turn of thought of this fascinating man. Say what she may, he at once turns it into virtual devotion to himself. He appears to have a perfectly dreadful power to hang everybody; he considers her strongest avowal of present personal dislike the most promising indication she can give of eternal future infatuation with him, and his powerful mode of reasoning is more profound and composing than an article in a New York newspaper on a War in Europe. Rendered dizzy by his metaphysical conversation, she arises from the rustic seat, and is flying giddily into the house, when he leaps athletically after her, and catches her in the doorway.

"I merely wish to request," he says, quietly, "that you place sufficient restraint upon your naturally happy feelings to keep our engagement a secret from the public at present, as I can't bear to have boys calling out after me, 'There's the feller that's goin' to get married! There's the feller that's goin' to get married!' When a man is about to make a fool of himself, it is not for children to remind him of it."

The door being opened before she can answer, FLORA receives a parting bow of Grandisonian elegance from Mr. BUMSTEAD, and hastens up stairs to her room in a distraction of mind not uncommon to those having conversational relations with the Ritualistic organist.

_(To be Continued.)_

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Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by the PUNCHINELLO PUBLISHING COMPANY, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York.

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A GOOD FIGHT.

We presume that all the Boston people "lecture" at times; at any rate they could, if they wanted to. No one doubts their ability.

But, let the number of these imparters of information be ever so great, we have reason to doubt whether any other of these accomplished parties has grappled with so formidable, so tremendous a subject, as that which is now exciting the powerful mind of Miss LILLIAN EDGARTON.

She is going to do it, though! If her life is spared, and her constitution remains free from blight, (both of which felicities we trust will be hers,) that subject has got to come under.

That all may know how great is the task, and the confidence required to pitch into it, we announce, with a flourish, that Miss L. E. is about to attack that well-known Saurian Monster, termed GOSSIP! Considered as a Disease, she proposes to find the Cause and the Cure. Considered as a living and gigantic Nuisance (by far surpassing any Dragon described by SPENSER,) she designs to hunt him out and slay him incontinently.

Courage, fair Knight! Our eldest Son is kept in reserve for some such Heroine! If you would be famous, if you would make a perfect thing of this Crusade, if you would render the lives of your fellow mortals longer and happier, if you would win that noble and ingenuous youth, our son, go in vehemently!

And, while you are about it, LILLIAN, would you object to giving your attention to certain relations of the monster which you propose to slay? We name them, Detraction and Calumny. They are tough old Dragons, now, we tell you; perhaps it were best to fight shy of them.

We have it, LILLIAN! Leave 'em to us! Us, with a big U! You kill little Gossip, and see how quick his brothers and sisters will fall, before our mighty battle-axe!

(And so they will fall, sure enough, but it will be simply because when our dear young knight, L.E., has killed _her_ Dragon, she will have wiped out the whole brood! They can't live without their sweet and attractive little sister. And so, like many a bigger humbug, we shall take great credit, that belongs to somebody else, and assume to have done big things, at enormous expense of blood and money. Trust us, for that!)

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NAPOLEON III AT SEDAN.

September, 1870.

I _was_ an Emperor. _Voilà c'est bon!_
BAZAINE, MACMAHON, fought--'twas my affair.
Only, to please my doctor, NELATON,
I left the throne, to take a Sedan chair.

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Unlimited Lie-Ability.

_Veritas_ writes to say that as he was crossing the ferry from Wall Street to Brooklyn, yesterday afternoon, he counted 117 persons reading PUNCHINELLO. He did not observe a single copy of the _Sun_ on board, until the boat neared Brooklyn, when a man of squalid appearance produced from a dirty newspaper some soiled articles, all of which seemed to have been steeped in Lye, from contact with the sheet, which proved to be the _Sun._

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A Con for the "Ninth."

What is there in common between Colonel FISK'S war-horse and a New York Ice Company?

Both are tremendous Chargers.

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THE PLAYS AND SHOWS.

Here I am again, back from the seashore, to find the theatres opening, the war closing, and GREELEY burning to imitate the late French Emperor, by leading the Republican hosts to defeat in the Fall campaign, so as to be in a position to write to the Germanically named HOFFMAN--"As I cannot fall, ballot in hand, at the head of my repeaters, I surrender to your victorious Excellency."

Being back, I went to see _Julius Cæsar_ at NIBLO'S Garden. It was the day when the French CAESER fell, and the impertinent soothsayer, ROCHEFORT, who had so often advised him to beware, not of the Ides of March, but of the _Idées Napoléoniennes,_ (there is a feeble attempt at a pun here) obtained his liberty, and the right to assail in his newspaper, the virtue of every female relative of the Imperial family. Of course I know that JULIUS CÆSAR was not a Frenchman--for the modesty of his "Commentaries" is proverbial--and that SHAKESPEARE never so much as heard of the Man of December. Nevertheless the two CÆSARS were inextricably mixed up in my mind. I know that two or three editorial persons who sat close by me, were continually talking of NAPOLEON, and I may possibly have confounded their remarks with those of the actors. Still I could not divest myself of the impression that I was sometimes in Paris and sometimes in Rome, and that the sepulchral voice of Mr. THEODORE HAMILTON, was more often that of NAPOLEON than that of JULIUS. The play presents itself to my recollection in the following shape. As I said before, it was represented at the very moment that the French republicans, being satisfied with the bees in their respective bonnets, were obliterating the imperial bees from the doors of the Tuileries, and being anxious to take arms against a sea of Prussians, were taking down the imperial arms wherever they could find them. Remembering this, the reader will be able to account for any slight difference in text between my _Julius Cæsar,_ and that of the respectable and able Mr. SHAKESPEARE.