“Allie!” he cries, dancing ecstatically.
It is the Umbrella—old familiar bone-handle, brass ferrule—in a bran-new dress of alpaca!
All gaze at him with unspeakable emotion, as, with the rope cast from him, he pats his dear old friend, opens her half way, shuts her again, and the while smiles with ineffable tenderness.
Suddenly a shriek—the voice of Flora—breaks the silence:—
“It rains!—oh, my complexion!”
“Rains?” thunders the regenerated Bumstead, in a tone of inconceivable triumph. “So it does. Now then, Allie, do your duty;” and, with a softly wooing, hospitable air, he opens the umbrella and holds it high over his head.
By a common instinct they all swarm in upon him, craning their heads far over each other’s shoulders to secure a share of the Providential shelter. The glare of the great bonfire falls upon the scene; the rain pours down in torrents: they crowd in upon him on all sides, until what was once a stately Ritualistic man resembles some tremendous monster with seventeen wriggling bodies, thirty-four legs, and an alpaca canopy above all.
The end.
* * * * *
The race of the dauntless and Cambria.
Punchinello’s Sporting Special went down to Sandy Hook last week to supervise the race between the Dauntless and the Cambria. The affair was consequently a great success.
Attired in white corduroy breeches, a blue velvet waistcoat, and a light boating-jacket of yellow flannel, your reporter left the Battery at 6 hrs. 22 m, and 5 secs, on Friday morning, and steamed slowly down the bay in the editorial row-boat Punchinelletto, which was manned by an individual of remarkable oar-acular powers. So highly was he gifted indeed in this respect, that your special was enabled to predict the result of the aquatic gambols with perfect accuracy, as it afterward appeared. Having got the yachts in position, he gave Messrs. BENNETT and ASHBURY an audience, in which it was settled by your representative that, owing to a split in the Cambria’s club-topsail, both parties should carry their block-headed jibs; and the contest was begun.
In his anxiety to see fair play, however, your reporter at first innocently took the lead, shooting off, at the given signal, far in advance of the two yachts. His surprise was therefore great when the latter suddenly hove to on their beam-ends, and declared an armistice, to permit of Mr. ASHBURY’S publishing the following:
Card.
Much as I appreciate the kindness and attention extended to me on all previous occasions in these waters, I must still politely insist that the Punchinelletto relinquish her natural and perhaps unavoidable tendency to take the wind out of everybody’s sails, and submit to remain in the wake of these yachts during the continuance of the race. And I hereby challenge all fast-sailing yachts of over 100 tons burthen, and under 50, to a 15-mile race dead to windward and back again alive.