Visit to Essex Market--Peculiarities of Edward Bobber--Palmerston hook the eel-catcher--The poet in Limbo--Warbles moralises--A German witness--The oath--Disturbed by cats--Mysterious caterwaulings--The mystery explained--Bad liquor--A Tombs lawyer--His retainer--An Irish wake--An eccentric corpse--A free fight--The corpse in court--The case concluded--Timothy Mulrooney--Michael's virtues--Timothy's cat--Mr. Blobb--A knowing officer--Old Dog Tray--Blobb discharged--Quackenbush confesses--Quackenbush forgiven 231 THE HAMLET NIGHT. Attempt to swindle the darling public--The ghost--A small Hamlet and large Queen--The ghost in an overcoat--The death scene--Overdale's ideas--An unappreciative boy--Inconsistencies--Clockwork legs--A complicated case 289 MRS. THROUGHBY DAYLIGHT'S FANCY DRESS JAM. A complicated case--Mr. Spout's offer--Dropper bewildered--Spout expatiates upon the genius of Brown--The Turk and Choctaw--The fancy dress jam--The Elephants at the fancy dress jam--The result 304 CONCLUSION. The club in danger--Resolutions--The records of the club--Their compilation--The last of the Elephant Club 318 HISTORY AND RECORDS. HOW THEY MET. [Enter with a Flourish of Trumpets.] SHAKESPEARE. [Illustration] THERE were _no_ two horses to be seen winding along the base of a precipitous hill; and there were _no_ dark-looking riders on those horses which were not to be seen; and it _wasn't_ at the close of a dusky autumn evening; and the setting sun _didn't_ gild, with his departing rays, the steep summit of the mountain tops; and the gloomy cry of the owl was _not_ to be heard from the depths of a neighboring forest--first, because there _wasn't_ any neighboring forest, and, second, because the owl was in better business, having, some hours before, gone to bed, it now being broad daylight. The mountain tops, the lofty summits, the inaccessible precipices, the precipitous descents, the descending inaccessibilities, and the usual quantity of insurmountable landscape, which forms the stereotyped opening to popular romances, is here omitted by particular request. The time and place to which the unfortunate reader's attention is particularly called, are four o'clock of a melting afternoon in August, and a labyrinth of bricks and mortar, yclept Gotham. The majority of the inhabitants of the aforesaid place, at the identical time herein referred to, were perspiring; others were sweltering; still others were melting down into their boots, and the remainder were dying from sun-stroke.