The barred light shone on a musty skeleton, to which still clung a few mouldy shreds left by the rats; and only the celebrated bone handle identified it as what had once been the maddened finder’s idolized Alpaca Umbrella.

“Aha!” twitted the apparition, “then you have some heart left, John Bumstead?”

“Heart!” moaned the distracted organist, fairly kissing the dear remains, and restored to perfect speech and comprehension by the awful shock.  “I had one, but it is broken now!—­Allie, my long-lost Allie!” he continued, tenderly apostrophizing the skeleton, “do we meet thus at last again?—­

    ’What thought is folded in thy leaves! 
       What tender thought, what speechless pain! 
     I hold thy faded lips to mine,
       Thou darling of the April rain!’

Where is thine old familiar alpaca dress, my Allie?  Where is the canopy that has so often sheltered thy poor master’s head from the storm?  Gone! gone! and through my own forgetfulness!”

“And have you no thought for your nephew?” asked the persevering apparition, hoarsely.

“Not under the present circumstances,” retorted the mourner; he and the ghost both coughing with the colds which they had taken from standing still so long in such a damp place—­“not under the present circumstances,” he repeated, wildly, making a fierce pass at the spectre with the skeleton, and then dropping the latter to the ground in nerveless despair.  “To a single man, his umbrella is wife, mother, sister, venerable maiden aunt from the country—­all in one.  In losing mine, I’ve lost my whole family, and want to hear no more about relatives.  Good night, sir.”

“Here! hold on!  Can’t you leave the lantern for a moment?” cried the ghost.  But the heart-stricken Ritualist had swarmed up the ladder and was gone.

Then, going up too, the spectre appeared also unto two other men, who crawled from behind pauper headstones at his summons; the face of the one being that of J. MCLAUGHLIN, that of the other Mr. Tracy CLEWS.  And the spectre walked between these two, carrying Mr. BUMSTEAD’S skeleton in its hand.[1]

[Footnote 1:  The cut accompanying the above chapter is from the illustrated title-page of the English monthly numbers of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood;”—­in which it is the last of a series of border-vignettes; —­and plainly shows that it was the author’s intention to bring back his hero a living man before the conclusion of the story.]

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PUNCHINELLO CORRESPONDENCE

Answers to correspondents.

Bibo.—­Is there a champagne wine having the flavor of gun-flints?

Answer.—­The wine made at Pierry, in the Champagne country, is said by connoisseurs to be so flavored.  There is much alarm now among the wine-growers, however, lest the next vintage may have a flavor of percussion-caps instead, owing to the war and the modern weapons.