Chapter I: Dawnation

A modern American Ritualistic Spire! How can the modern American Ritualistic Spire be here! The well-known tapering brown Spire, like a closed umbrella on end? How can that be here? There is no rusty rim of a shocking bad hat between the eye and that Spire in the real prospect. What is the rusty rim that now intervenes, and confuses the vision of at least one eye? It must be an intoxicated hat that wants to see, too. It is so, for ritualistic choirs strike up, acolytes swing censers dispensing the heavy odor of punch, and the ritualistic rector and his gaudily robed assistants in alb, chasuble, maniple and tunicle, intone a _Nux Vomica_ in gorgeous procession. Then come twenty young clergymen in stoles and birettas, running after twenty marriageable young ladies of the congregation who have sent them worked slippers. Then follow ten thousand black monkies swarming all over everybody and up and down everything, chattering like fiends. Still the Ritualistic Spire keeps turning up in impossible places, and still the intervening rusty rim of a hat inexplicably clouds one eye. There dawns a sensation as of writhing grim figures of snakes in one's boots, and the intervening rusty rim of the hat that was not in the original prospect takes a snake-like--But stay! Is this the rim of my own hat tumbled all awry? I' mushbe! A few reflective moments, not unrelieved by hiccups, mush be d'voted to co'shider-ERATION of th' posh'bil'ty.

Nodding excessively to himself with unspeakable gravity, the gentleman whose diluted mind has thus played the Dickens with him, slowly arises to an upright position by a series of complicated manoeuvres with both hands and feet; and, having carefully balanced himself on one leg, and shaking his aggressive old hat still farther down over his left eye, proceeds to take a cloudy view of his surroundings. He is in a room going on one side to a bar, and on the other side to a pair of glass doors and a window, through the broken panes of which various musty cloth substitutes for glass ejaculate toward the outer Mulberry Street. Tilted back in chairs against the wall, in various attitudes of dislocation of the spine and compound fracture of the neck, are an Alderman of the ward, an Assistant-Assessor, and the lady who keeps the hotel. The first two are shapeless with a slumber defying every law of comfortable anatomy; the last is dreamily attempting to light a stumpy pipe with the wrong end of a match, and shedding tears, in the dim morning ghastliness, at her repeated failures.

"Thry another," says this woman, rather thickly, to the gentleman balanced on one leg, who is gazing at her and winking very much. "Have another, wid some bitters."

He straightens himself extremely, to an imminent peril of falling over backward, sways slightly to and fro, and becomes as severe in expression of countenance as his one uncovered eye will allow.

The woman falls back in her chair again asleep, and he, walking with one shoulder depressed, and a species of sidewise, running gait, approaches and poises himself over her.

"What vision can _she_ have?" the man muses, with his hat now fully upon the bridge of his nose. He smiles unexpectedly; as suddenly frowns with great intensity; and involuntarily walks backward against the sleeping Alderman. Him he abstractedly sits down upon, and then listens intently for any casual remark he may make. But one word comes-- "Wairzernat'chal'zationc'tif'kits."

"Unintelligent!" mutters the man, weariedly; and, rising dejectedly from the Alderman, lurches, with a crash, upon the Assistant-Assessor. Him he shakes fiercely for being so bony to fall on, and then hearkens for a suitable apology.

"Warzwaz-yourwifesincome-lash'--lash'-year?"

A thoughtful pause, partaking of a doze.

"Unintelligent!"

Complicatedly arising from the Assessor, with his hat now almost hanging by an ear, the gentleman, after various futile but ingenious efforts to face towards the door by turning his head alone that way, finally succeeds by walking in a circle until the door is before him. Then, with his whole countenance charged with almost scowling intensity of purpose, though finding it difficult to keep his eyes very far open, he balances himself with the utmost care, throws his shoulders back, steps out daringly, and goes off at an acute slant toward the Alderman again. Recovering himself by a tremendous effort of will and a few wild backward movements, he steps out jauntily once more, and can not stop himself until he has gone twice around a chair on his extreme left and reached almost exactly the point from which he started the first time. He pauses, panting, but with the scowl of determination still more intense, and concentrated chiefly in his right eye. Very cautiously extending his dexter hand, that he may not destroy the nicety of his perpendicular balance, he points with a finger at the knob of the door, and suffers his stronger eye to fasten firmly upon the same object. A moment's balancing, to make sure, and then, in three irresistible, rushing strides, he goes through the glass doors with a burst, without stopping to turn the latch, strikes an ash-box on the edge of the sidewalk, rebounds to a lamp-post, and then, with the irresistible rush still on him, describes a hasty wavy line, marked by irregular heel-strokes, up the street.

That same afternoon, the modern American Ritualistic Spire rises in duplicate illusion before the multiplying vision of a traveller recently off the ferry-boat, who, as though not satisfied with the length of his journey, makes frequent and unexpected trials of its width. The bells are ringing for vesper service; and, having fairly made the right door at last, after repeatedly shooting past and falling short of it, he reaches his place in the choir and performs voluntaries and involuntaries upon the organ, in a manner not distinguishable from almost any fashionable church-music of the period.