During the last few weeks, an attack of dyspepsia had laid the foundation of a mind in the Flowerpot, as it generally does in other young female American boarding-school thinkers, and she was now capable of that subtle line of reasoning which is the great commendation of her sex to a recognized perfect intellectual equality with man.  Once decided, by her apprehension of a General European War, against marriage with J. BUMSTEAD, she took a rather irritable view of that too attractive devotional musician, and inferred, from his not being wealthy enough to stand the test of possible transatlantic hostilities, that he must, himself, have killed EDWIN DROOD.  His umbrella, it was well known, had been present at that fatal Christmas dinner; and a thoughtless insult offered to it, even by his nephew, might have made a demon of him.  Suppose that EDWIN, upon returning to the dining-room that night, after his temporary exercise in the open air with MONTGOMERY PENDRAGON, had found his uncle, flushed with cloves, endeavoring to force a social glass of lemon tea upon the umbrella, under the impression that it was a person, and had unthinkingly accused him thereat of being momentarily unsettled in his faculties?  Probably, then, hot words would have passed between them; each telling the other that he would have a nice headache in the morning and find it impossible not to look very sleepy even if he fixed his hair ever so elaborately.  Blows might have followed:  the uncle, in his anger, hewing the nephew limb from limb with the carving knife from the table, and subsequently carrying away the remains to the Pond and there casting them in.  Suppose, in his natural excitement, the uncle had hurriedly used the umbrella, opened and held downward, to carry the remains in; and, after coming home again, and snatching a nap under the table, had forgotten all about it, and thus been ever since inconsolable for his alpaca loss?  As the young orphan argued thus exhaustively to herself, the extreme probability of her suppositions made her more and more frenzied to fly instantly beyond the reach of one who, in the event of a General European War, would not be a husband whom her head could approve.

After penning a hasty farewell note to Miss CAROWTHERS, to the effect that urgent military reasons obliged her to see her guardian at once, FLORA lost no time in packing a small leather satchel for travel.  Two bottles of hair oil, a jar of glycerine, one of cold cream, two boxes of powder, a package of extra back-hair, a phial of belladonna, a camel’s-hair brush for the eyebrows, a rouge-saucer for pinking the nails, four flasks of perfumery, a depilatory in a small flagon, and some tooth paste, were the only articles she could pause to collect for her precipitate escape; and, with them in the satchel on her arm, and a bonnet and shawl hurriedly thrown on, she stole away down-stairs, and thus from the house.

Hastening to the Roach House, from whence started an omnibus for the ferry, she was quickly rattling out of Bumsteadville in a vehicle remarkable for the great number and variety of noises it could make when maddened into motion by a span of equine rivals in an immemorial walking-match.