Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870
THE MYSTERY OF MR. E. DROOD.
AN ADAPTATION.
BY ORPHEUS C. KERR.
CHAPTER III.
THE ALMS-HOUSE.
For the purpose of preventing an inconvenient rush of literarytuft-hunters and sight-seers thither next summer, a fictitious name mustbe bestowed upon the town of the Ritualistic church. Let it stand inthese pages as Bumsteadville. Possibly it was not known to the Romans,the Saxons, nor the Normans by that name, if by any name at all; buta name more or less weird and full of damp syllables can be of littlemoment to a place not owned by any advertising Suburban-Residencebenefactors.
A disagreeable and healthy suburb, Bumsteadville, with a strange odor ofdried bones from its ancient pauper burial-ground, and many quaintold ruins in the shapes of elderly men engaged as contributors to themonthly magazines of the day. Antiquity pervades Bumsteadville; nothingis new; the very Rye is old; also the Jamaica, Santa Cruz, and a numberof the native maids. A drowsy place, with all its changes lying farbehind it; or, at least, the sun-browned mendicants passing through saythey never saw a place offering so little present change.
In the midst of Bumsteadville stands the Alms-House; a building of anantic order of architecture; still known by its original title to thepaynobility and indigentry of the surrounding country, several ofwhose ancestors abode there in the days before voting was a certainlivelihood; although now bearing a door-plate inscribed, "MacassarFemale College, Miss CAROWTHERS." Whether any of the country editors,projectors of American Comic papers, and other inmates of the edifice intimes of yore, ever come back in spirit to be astonished by the mannerin which modern serious and humorous print can be made productive ofanything but penury by publishing True Stories of Lord BYRON and theautobiographies of detached wives, maybe of interest to philosophers,but is of no account to Miss CAROWTHERS. Every day, during school-hours,does Miss CAROWTHERS, in spectacles and high-necked alpaca, preside overher Young Ladies of Fashion, with an austerity and elderlinessbefore which every mental image of Man, even as the most poetical ofabstractions, withers and dies. Every night, after the young ladies haveretired, does Miss CAROWTHERS put on a freshening aspect, don a moreyouthful low-necked dress—
As though a rose |
and become a sprightlier Miss CAROWTHERS. Every night, at the same hour,does Miss CAROWTHERS discuss with her First Assistant, Mrs. PILLSBURY,the Inalienable Bights of Women; always making certain casual referenceto a gentleman in the dim past, whom she was obliged to sue for breachof promise, and to whom, for that reason, Miss CAROWTHERS airily refers,with a toleration bred of the lapse of time, as "Breachy Mr. BLODGETT."
The pet pupil of the Alms-House is FLORA POTTS, of course called theFlowerpot; for whom a husband has been chosen by the will and bequest ofher departed papa, and at whom none of the other Macassar young ladiescan look without wondering how it must feel. On the afternoon after theday of the dinner at the