Chapter XXII: (Continued.)

When Miss POTTS and Mr. SIMPSON rejoined Mr. DIBBLE, in the office of the latter, across the street, it was decided that the flighty young girl should be made less expensive to her friends by temporary accommodation in an economical boarding-house, and that the Gospeler, returning to Bumsteadville, should persuade Miss CAROWTHERS to come and stay with her until the time for the reopening of the Macassar Female College.

Subsequently, with his homeless ward upon his arm, the benignant old lawyer underwent a series of scathing rebuffs from the various high-strung descendants of better days at whose once luxurious but now darkened homes he applied for the desired board. Time after time was he reminded, by unspeakably majestic middle-aged ladies with bass voices, that when a fine old family loses its former wealth by those vicissitudes of fortune which bring out the noblest traits of character and compel the letting-out of a few damp rooms, it is significant of a weak understanding, or a depraved disrespect of the dignity of adversity, to expect that such families shall lose money and lower their hereditary high tone by waiting upon a parcel of young girls. A few Single Gentlemen desiring all the comforts of a home would not be considered insulting unless they objected to the butter, and a couple of married Childless Gentlemen with their wives might be pardoned for respectfully applying; but the idea of a parcel of young girls! Wherever he went, the reproach of not being a few Single Gentlemen, or a, couple of married Childless Gentlemen with their wives, abashed Mr. DIBBLE into helpless retreat; while FLORA'S increasing guilty consciousness of the implacable sentiment against her as a parcel of young girls, culminated at last in tears. Finally, when the miserable lawyer was beginning to think strongly of the House of the Good Shepherd, or the Orphan Asylum, as a last resort, it suddenly occurred to him that Mrs. SKAMMERHORN, a distant widowed aunt of his clerk, Mr. BLADAMS, had been known to live upon boarders in Bleecker Street; and thither he dragged hastily the despised object on his arm.

Being a widow without children, and relieved of nearly all the weaknesses of her sex by the systematic refusal of the opposite sex to give her any encouragement in them, Mrs. SKAMMERHORN was a relentless advocate of Woman's Inalienable Rights, and only wished that Man could just see himself in that contemptible light in which he was distinctly visible to One who, sooner than be his Legal Slave, would never again accompany him to the Altar.

"I tell you candidly, DIBBLE," said she, in answer to his application, "that if you had applied to be taken yourself, I should have said 'Never!' and at once called in the police. Since SKAMMERHORN died delirious, I have always refused to have his sex in the house, and I tell you, frankly, that I consider it hardly human. If this girl of yours, however, and the elderly female whom, you say, she expects to join her in a few days, will make themselves generally useful about the house, and try to be companions to me, I can give them the very room where SKAMMERHORN died."

Perceiving that FLORA turned pale, her guardian whispered to her that she would not be alone in the room, at any rate; and then respectfully asked whether the late Mr. SKAMMERHORN had ever been seen around the house since his death?

"To be frank with you," answered the widow, "I did think that I came upon him once in the closet, with his back to me, as often I'd seen the weak creature in life going after a bottle on the top shelf. But it was only his coat hanging there, with his boots standing below and my muff hanging over to look like his head."

"You think, then," said Mr. DIBBLE, inquiringly, "that it is such a room as two ladies could occupy, without awaking at midnight with a strange sensation and thinking they felt a supernatural presence?"

"Not if the bed was rightly searched beforehand, and all the joints well peppered with magnetic powder," was the assuring answer.

"Could we see the room, madam?"

"If the shutters were open you could; as they're not;" returned the widow, not offering to stir; "but ever since SKAMMERHORN, starting up with a howl, said 'Here he comes again, red-hot!' and tried to jump out of the window, I've never opened them for any single man, and never shall. I couldn't bear it, DIBBLE, to see one of your sex in that room again, and hope you will not insist."

Broken in spirit as he was by preceding humiliations, the old lawyer had not the heart to contest the point, and it was agreed, that, upon the arrival of Miss CAROWTHERS from Bumsteadville, she and FLORA should accept the memorable room in question.

Upon their way back to the hotel, guardian and ward met Mr. BENTHAM, who, from the moment of becoming a character in their Story, had been possessed with that mysterious madness for open-air exercise which afflicted every acquaintance of the late EDWIN DROOD, and now saluted them in the broiling street and solemnly besought their company for a long walk. "It has occurred to me," said the Comic Paper man, who had resumed his black worsted gloves, "that Mr. DIBBLE and Miss POTTS may be willing to aid me in walking-off some of the darker suicidal inclinations incident to first-class Humorous Journalism in America. Reading the 'proof' of an instalment of a comic serial now publishing in my paper, I contracted such gloom, that a frantic rush into the fresh air was my only hope of on escape from self-destruction. Let us walk, if you please."

Led on, in the profoundest melancholy, by this chastened character, Mr. DIBBLE and the Flowerpot were presently toiling hotly through a succession of grievous side-streets, and forlorn short-cuts to dismal ferries; the state of their conductor's spirits inclining him to find a certain refreshingly solemn joy in the horrors of pedestrianism imposed by obstructions of merchandise on side-walks, and repeated climbings over skids extending from store doors to drays. Inspired to an extraordinary flow of malignant animal spirits by the complexities of travel incident to the odorous mazes of some hundred odd kegs of salt mackerel and boxes of brown soap impressively stacked before one very enterprising Commission house, Mr. BENTHAM lightened the journey with anecdotes of self-made Commission men who had risen in life by breaking human legs and city ordinances; and dwelt emotionally upon the scenes in the city hospitals where ladies and gentlemen were brought in, with nails from the hoops of sugar-hogsheads sticking into their feet, or limbs dislocated from too-loftily piled firkins of butter falling upon them. Through incredible hardships, and amongst astounding complications of horse-cars, target companies, and barrels of everything, Mr. BENTHAM also amused his friends with circuits of several of the fine public markets of New York; explaining to them the relations of the various miasmatic smells of those quaint edifices with the various devastating diseases of the day, and expatiating quite eloquently upon the political corruption involved in the renting of the stalls, and the fine openings there were for Cholera and Yellow Fever in the Fish and Vegetable departments. Then, as a last treat, he led his panting companions through several lively up-hill blocks of drug-mills and tobacco firms, to where they had a distant view of a tenement house next door to a kerosene factory, where, as he vivaciously told them, in the event of a fire, at least one hundred human beings would be slowly done to a turn. After which all three returned from their walk, firmly convinced that an unctuous vein of humor had been conscientiously worked, and abstractedly wishing themselves dead.[1]

The exhilarating effect of the genial Comic Paper man upon FLORA did not, indeed, pass away, until she and Miss CAROWTHERS were in their appointed quarters under the roof of Mrs. SKAMMERHORN, whither they went immediately upon the arrival of the elder spinster from Bumsteadville.

"It could have been wished, my good woman," said Miss CAROWTHERS, casting a rather disparaging look around the death-chamber of the late Mr. SKAMMERHORN, "that you had assigned to educated single young ladies, like ourselves, an apartment less suggestive of Man in his wedded aspects. The spectacle of a pair of pegged boots sticking out from under a bed, and a razor and a hone grouped on the mantle-shelf, is not such as I should desire to encourage in the dormitory of a pupil under my tuition."

"That's much to be deplored, I'm sure, CAROWTHERS," returned Mrs. SKAMMERHORN, severely, "and sorry am I that I ever married, on that particular account. I'd not have done it, if you'd only told me. But, seeing that I married SKAMMERHORN, and then he died delirious, his boots and razor must remain, just as he often wished to throw the former at me in his ravings. Once married is enough, say I; and those who never were, through having no proposals, must bear with those who have, and take things as they come."

"There are those, I'd have you know, Mrs. SKAMMERHORN, to whom proposals have been no inducement," said Miss CAROWTHERS, sharply; "or, if being made, and then withdrawn, have given our sex opportunities to prove, in courts of law, that damages can still be got. I'm afraid of no Man, my good woman, as a person named BLODGETT once learned from a jury; but boots and razors are not what I would have familiar to the mind of one who never had a husband to die in raging torments, nor yet has sued for breach."

"Miss POTTS is but a chicken, I'll admit," retorted Mrs. SKAMMERHORN; "but you're not such, CAROWTHERS, by many a good year. On the contrary, quite a hen. Then, you being with her, if the boots and razor make her think she sees that poor, weak SKAMMERHORN a-ranging round the room, when in his grave it is his place to be, you've only got to say: 'A fool you are, and always were,'--as often I, myself, called at him in his lifetime,--and off he'll go into his tomb again for fear of broomsticks."

"FLORA, my dear," said Miss CAROWTHERS, turning with dignity to her pupil, "if I know anything of human nature, the man who has once got away from here, will stay away. Only single ghosts have attachments for the houses in which they once lived. So, never mind the boots and razor, darling; which, after all, if seen by peddlers, or men who come to fix the gas, might keep us safe from robbers."

"As safe as any man himself, young woman, with pistols under his head that he would never dare to fire if robbers were no more than cats rampaging," added Mrs. SKAMMERHORN, enthusiastically. "With nothing but an old black hat of SKAMMERHORN'S, and walking-cane, kept hanging in the hall, I haven't lost a spoon by tramps or census takers for six mortal years. So, make yourselves at home, I beg you both, while I go down and cook the liver for our dinner. You'll find it tender as a chicken, after what you've broke your teeth upon in boarding-schools; though SKAMMERHORN declared it made him bilious in the second year, forgetting what he'd drank with sugar to his taste, beforehand."

Thus was sweet FLORA POTTS introduced to her new home; where, but for looking down from her windows at the fashions, making-up hundreds of bows of ribbons for her neck, and making-over all her dresses, her woman's mind must have been a blank. What time Miss CAROWTHERS told her all day how she looked in this or that style of wearing her hair, and read her to sleep each night with extracts from the pages of cheery HANNAH MORE. As for the object nearest her young heart, to say that she was wholly unruffled by it would be inaccurate; but by address she kept it hidden from all eyes save her own.

[Footnote 1: Ordinary readers, while admiring the heavy humor of this unexpected open-air episode, may wonder what on earth it has to do with the the Story; but the cultivated few, understanding the ingenious mechanics of novel-writing, will appreciate it as a most skilful and happy device to cover the interval between the hiring of Mrs. SKAMMERHORN's room, and the occupation thereof by FLORA and her late teacher--another instance of what our profoundly critical American journals call "artistic--elaboration." (See corresponding Chapter of the original English Story.)]