Perceiving that Flora turned pale, her guardian whispered to her that she would not be alone in the room, at any rate; and then respectfully asked whether the late Mr. SKAMMERHORN had ever been seen around the house since his death?

“To be frank with you,” answered the widow, “I did think that I came upon him once in the closet, with his back to me, as often I’d seen the weak creature in life going after a bottle on the top shelf.  But it was only his coat hanging there, with his boots standing below and my muff hanging over to look like his head.”

“You think, then,” said Mr. Dibble, inquiringly, “that it is such a room as two ladies could occupy, without awaking at midnight with a strange sensation and thinking they felt a supernatural presence?”

“Not if the bed was rightly searched beforehand, and all the joints well peppered with magnetic powder,” was the assuring answer.

“Could we see the room, madam?”

“If the shutters were open you could; as they’re not;” returned the widow, not offering to stir; “but ever since SKAMMERHORN, starting up with a howl, said ‘Here he comes again, red-hot!’ and tried to jump out of the window, I’ve never opened them for any single man, and never shall.  I couldn’t bear it, Dibble, to see one of your sex in that room again, and hope you will not insist.”

Broken in spirit as he was by preceding humiliations, the old lawyer had not the heart to contest the point, and it was agreed, that, upon the arrival of Miss CAROWTHERS from Bumsteadville, she and Flora should accept the memorable room in question.

Upon their way back to the hotel, guardian and ward met Mr. Bentham, who, from the moment of becoming a character in their Story, had been possessed with that mysterious madness for open-air exercise which afflicted every acquaintance of the late Edwin DROOD, and now saluted them in the broiling street and solemnly besought their company for a long walk.  “It has occurred to me,” said the Comic Paper man, who had resumed his black worsted gloves, “that Mr. Dibble and Miss Potts may be willing to aid me in walking-off some of the darker suicidal inclinations incident to first-class Humorous Journalism in America.  Reading the ‘proof’ of an instalment of a comic serial now publishing in my paper, I contracted such gloom, that a frantic rush into the fresh air was my only hope of on escape from self-destruction.  Let us walk, if you please.”

Led on, in the profoundest melancholy, by this chastened character, Mr. Dibble and the Flowerpot were presently toiling hotly through a succession of grievous side-streets, and forlorn short-cuts to dismal ferries; the state of their conductor’s spirits inclining him to find a certain refreshingly solemn joy in the horrors of pedestrianism imposed by obstructions of merchandise on side-walks, and repeated climbings over skids extending from store doors to drays.