continues full of stones, Mr. BUMSTEAD takes JOHN MCLAUGHLIN'S arm, as
they move onward, to protect the old man from harm, and is so careful to
pick out the choice parts of the road for him that their progress is
digressive in the extreme.

"I have heard," says Mr. BUMSTEAD, "that at one end of the pauper
burial-ground there still remains the cellar of a former chapel to the
Alms-House, and that you have broken through into it, and got a
stepladder to go down. Isthashso?"

"Yes; and there's coffins down there."

"Yours is a hic-stremely strange life, JOHN MCLAUGHLIN."

"It's certainly a very damp one," says MCLAUGHLIN, silently urging his
strange companion to support a little more of his own weight in
walking. "But it has its science. Over in the Ritualistic burial-yard, I
tap the wall of a vault with my trowel-handle, and if the sound is
hollow I say to myself: 'Not full yet.' Say it's the First of May, and I
tap a coffin, and don't hear anything more in it, I say: 'Either you're
not a woman in there, or, if you are, you never kept house.'--Because,
you see, if it was a woman that ever kept house, it would take but the
least thing in the world to make her insist upon 'moving' on the First
of May."

"Won'rful!" says Mr. BUMSTEAD. "Sometime when you're sober, JOHN
MCLAUGHLIN, I'll do a grave or two with you."

On their way they reach a bar-room, into which Mr. BUMSTEAD is anxious
to take Old Mortarity, for the purpose of getting something to make the