“Madame, I beg your pardon, but you will please retire to the ladies’ dressing-room, disrobe, unpad, lay off your back-hair; and make yourself as comfortable as possible while some fresh coals are being put on the fire. When you have unmade your toilet you may touch that bell, and you will be nicely buttered and salted for the iron. A polite and gentlemanly attendant will occasionally turn you, and I shall take pleasure in looking in upon you once in a million years, to see that you are being properly done. Exceedingly sultry weather, Madame. _Au revoir_.” .... The funeral of the Rev. Father Byrne took place from the Church of the Holy Cross. The ceremonies were of the most solemn and impressive character, and were keenly enjoyed by the empty benches by which the Protestant clergy were ably represented. Why turned ye not out, O Biblethump, and Muddletext, and you, Hymnsing? Is it thus that the Master was wont to treat the dead? Now get thee into the secret recesses of thy closet, Rev. Lovepreach; knuckle down upon thy knees and pray to a tolerant God not to smite thee with a plague. For lo! thou hast been a bigoted, bat-eyed, cat-hearted fraud—a preacher of peace and a practiser of strife. For these many years thy tongue hath been dropping gospel honey, and thy soul secreting bitterness. Thy voice has been as the sound of glad horns upon a hill, but thy ways are the ways of a gaunt hound tracking the hunted stag. “Holier than we,” are you? And when the worker of differing faith is gone to his account, you turn your sleek back upon the God’s image as it is given to the waiting worms. Perdition seize thee and thy holiness! we’ll none of it. .... Two hundred dollars for biting a woman’s neck and arms! That was the sentence imposed upon the gentle Mr. Hill, because His Eminence set his incisors into the yielding tissue of Mrs. Langdon, a lady with whom his wife happened to be debating by means of a stew-kettle. If this monstrous decision stand, the writer owes the treasury about ten thousand dollars. Though by nature of a mild and gentle appetite, preferring simple roots and herbs, yet it has been his custom to nip all female necks and arms that have been willingly submitted unto his teeth. He hath found in this harmless, and he had supposed lawful, practice, an exceeding sweetness of sensation, and a satisfaction wherewith the delights of sausage, or the bliss of pigs’ feet, can in nowise compare. Having commonly found the gratification mutual, he thinks he is justified in maintaining its innocence.