[The American Press's Young Gentlemen, when taking their shady literary walks among the Columns of Interesting Matter, have been known to remark--with a glibness and grace, by Jove, greatly in excess of their salaries--that the reason why we don't produce great works of imagination in this country, as they do in other countries, is because we haven't the genius, you know. They think--do they?--that the bran-new localities, post-office addresses, and official titles, characteristic of the United States of America, are rife with all the grand old traditional suggestions so useful in helping along the romantic interest of fiction. They think--do they?--that if an American writer could write a Novel in the exact style of COLLINS, or TROLLOPE, or DICKENS: only laying its scenes and having its characters in this country; the work would be as romantically effective as one by COLLINS, or TROLLOPE, or DICKENS; and that the possibly necessary incidental mention of such native places as Schermerhorn Street, Dobb's Ferry, or Chicago, _wouldn't_ disturb the nicest dramatic illusion of the imaginative tale. Very well, then! All right! Just look here!--O A.P's Young Gentlemen, just look here--] 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.