Reader, have you ever gone a deer-hunting? Well, the first time you took your stand by the “station” where the older sportsmen told you the game was about to pass—you waited with cocked gun and beating heart. At length a rustle—a bound in the bushes, and another in your bosom—you turn, and the noble creature stands directly before you, looking calmly into your very eyes. Well, reader, did you shoot that deer? Mr. Short took a house the next day in Dishwater Place. * * * * * In other cities one day in the year answers for the anniversary of fools, but in Gotham it would seem to require two—and the first of May has come to be infinitely more celebrated for its orgies to Folly than its illustrious predecessor, the first of April. I am not about to attempt its history. Wrecks are its records; strewed along the curb-stones and side-walks that encompass the great ocean of metropolitan life, they beacon with the phosphoric light of decaying wash-stands, and the bleaching bones of dislocated bedsteads, the way to ruin. Suffice it that Mr. Short must “move” on the first of May, simply because every body moved. He had as yet no distinct notion of what he was about to undergo, but it hung over him like a vague, terrible, dark cloud. He counted the days and nights like a criminal waiting the day of his execution, or an undetected bankrupt for the maturity of his first note. He grew thin with apprehension and a kind of nameless terror, which, I have no doubt, furnished Bulwer the hint for his “Dweller of the Threshold.” At length came the eventful day. Mr. Short had at first tried to escape the horror of moving when every body else was moving, by precipitating his departure from Madison Street—but it was impossible. The house in Dishwater Place was not to be “vacated” until twelve o’clock on the first of May; and at that precise hour, so his landlord informed him, he must “vacate” the premises in Madison Street. Only think of it! Two hundred thousand people turned simultaneously out of house and home, with bed and baggage, on the striking of the clock, and each rushing madly about through a wilderness of fugitive furniture and cracked crockery, in search of a place to lay his head and set down his kettles and bandboxes!