To the Chief-Justice of Glenwood,

SUBLIME SIR:  ...  What can be more destructive of the higher forms of conversation than a pun?  What right has any one to explode a petard in the midst of sweet sociality, and blow every thing like sequence and sentiment sky-high?  And therefore, since you, as translator of the Pasha’s Letters, have taken pains to publish his observations on many social subjects, I think it eminently proper that you should ventilate the ideas of his friend Tompkins upon a not less important theme.

Happily, I have been saved the trouble of original composition, by a discovery made by my landlady while I was boarding a year ago on St. John’s Park.  Mr. Green, our attic boarder, went off suddenly one day to see a friend in the country, as he said.  Of course our landlady searched his room, with a view of reading his letters; and in a brown hair-trunk, with a boot-jack, a razor-strop, a box of Seidlitz powders, and an odd volume of Young’s Night Thoughts, she found the following manuscript.  The females of the house were satisfied with reading such letters as were left by Mr. Green in his apartment, and so this paper was handed over to me.  I may say that it was marked with pencil, “Declined with Thanks.”

“THE PUN FIEND.

“BY C. GREEN.

“I used to be corpulent, rosy-cheeked, and cheerful.  I am gaunt, pale, and morose now.  I used to sleep sweetly; but now I toss about upon my bed, terrified by hideous visions, and feelings as of a clammy hand or wet cloth laid on my face.  I was wont to walk about our streets after business hours, and on Sundays, with a genuine smile of enjoyment lighting up my face; but now I hurry along with my eyes cast down, and I seek by-ways and dark lanes for my rambles.  My friends think I am in love; persons who know me but slightly, suppose me a victim to remorse—­imagine that I wear a hair shirt, and macerate my flesh.  They are all wrong.  An old bachelor like myself has long ago buried the light of love in a tomb, and set a seal upon the great stone at the door; and as for remorse, I owe no tailor any thing, and do not at present blame myself for any great fault, except having once subscribed for six months to the New York Morning Cretan.  Nevertheless, my face grows haggard, my step weary, and even our Thursday’s beef a la mode fails to tempt my enfeebled appetite.

“I am haunted, haunted by a foul fiend.  He meets me at six, P.M., in our festive dining-room, and the fork or spoon drops from my nerveless grasp.  He follows me up to the parlor, where I sometimes talk of an evening to Miss Pipkin (Miss P. is our fourth story, front), and I become silent in his presence, and Pipkin votes me a bore.  He sits by my side when I am playing at whist, and I trump my partner’s trick, and the dear old game becomes disgusting.  He even dared once to follow me into church, but I cried ‘Avaunt!’ in a tone so peremptory, that he fled for a moment.  He joined me, however, as soon as service was over, and walked from Tenth Street to Madison Square, with his grizzly arm thurst through mine, and his diabolical jeers drumming on my tympana.  In dreams he perches on my breast, and clutches me by the throat.