- The Thug he felt exceeding hurt at her untimely fate,
- But his, though not so dreadful, was not nice, at any rate.
- The priest, in his fierce anger, had condemned him, it appears,
- To stand alone upon one leg for forty-seven years!
CHAPTER XXII.
An Arrival—A Present from a Congressman—Meditations upon his Purpose—The Patent Office Report of the Future—A Plan for Revolutionizing Public Documents and Opening a New Department of Literature—Our Trip to Salem—A Tragical Incident—The Last of Lieutenant Smiley.
A very mysterious package came to me through the post-office yesterday. I brought it home unopened, and, as is usual in such cases, we began to speculate upon the nature of the contents before we broke the seals. Everybody has a disposition to dally for a while with a letter or a package from an unknown source. Mrs. Adeler felt the parcel carefully, and said she was sure it was something from her aunt—something for the baby, probably. Bob imagined that it was an infernal machine forwarded by the revengeful Stonebury, and he insisted that I should put it to soak in a bucket of water for a few hours before removing the wrapper. The children were hopeful that some benign fairy had adopted this method of supplying the Adeler family with supernatural confectionery; and for my part, I had no doubt that some one of my friends among the publishers had sent me half a dozen of the latest books.
We opened the bundle gradually. When the outside casing was torn away, another envelope remained, and as this was slowly removed the excitement and curiosity reached an almost painful degree of intensity. At last all the papers were taken off, and I lifted from among them a large black volume. It was only a patent-office report sent to me by that incorruptible statesman and devoted patriot, the Congressman from our State.
