and other playful things, which put the entire audience in good humor.  But the strangest and most unexpected occurrence, was a grand rush, as of a herd of wild bulls, on the stairs, accompanied by the dousing of the one remaining light in the entry.  Another moment, and over a hundred of the choicest juvenile spirits tore into the hall, and knocked over each other and everybody else in a frantic contest for free seats.  The young ladies’ seminary screamed in concert, and all the elderly ladies cried, “Oh my!” “Good gracious!” “What’s that?”

“Only the boys,” said Tiffles, with unruffled composure.  “Let them come.  It is a moral entertainment, and will do them good.”

After a pause of about three minutes, giving the boys time to seat themselves, and the screams, mutterings, and laughter of the rest of the audience to die away, Tiffles said: 

“Now, ladies and gentlemen, I will introduce you to sunrise, in the Bight of Benin.”

This was the preconcerted signal for the raising of the curtain, which office was performed by Patching, without a hitch.  The gorgeous proem, or introduction to the panorama, was then for the first time disclosed to the public.  Patching blushed as he thought of the vile pandering to popular taste of which he had been guilty.

There was a dead calm for a minute.  Tiffles was silent, in order that he might not interrupt the quiet admiration of the spectators.  The spectators were silent, because they could not exactly understand the scene, and did not know whether to laugh, hiss, or applaud.  The silence was broken, by a boy in the back part of the hall: 

“I say, Mister, is that a cartwheel on top of a stonewall?”

“No, sonny not exactly,” said Tiffles.  “What your uneducated eyes mistake for a cartwheel is the rising sun.  The objects that your immature judgment confounds with spokes, are rays.  Your stone wall, it is hardly necessary to inform riper intellects, is a distant range of mountains.  It is one of Ceccarini’s happiest efforts.”

“Hurrah for Checkerberry!” cried another lad, mistaking the name of the high (imaginary) Italian artist.

“Are we to understand, sir, that this is a rolling prairie in the foreground?” asked a deep voice, which Tiffles at once recognized as emanating from C. Skimmerhorn, Esq.

“Oh! no, sir; it is the Bight of Benin; and I must say, though, perhaps, I am too partial, that Ceccarini never did a better thing.”

“The what of Benin?” asked the voice.

“The Bight—­or, in other words, as you may not be familiar with geography, the Bay of Benin.”

“Then why not say Bay, sir?” replied C. Skimmerhorn Esq., stung with the allusion to his want of geographical knowledge.  “Why this mystery about terms!”