How this is managed will become tolerably clear to the reader on examining the next diagram.
The tall Mr. S. had put a pair of boots on his hands, a roll of sheeting round his neck, so as to form something resembling a pillow, behind his head; then something on his arms under his chin to represent his chest (which is not shown in the diagram), and over that a baby's cradle-quilt, and then he rested his boots on another gentleman's shoulders; two long sticks were provided and slung as represented, and the miracle was complete. We have seen the figure lengthened to an inordinate extent by the same process, the only difference being that the gentlemen were further apart.
Mr. Nix's party concluded, after several other games and amusements, with a neat but inexpensive entertainment, consisting of sandwiches, sardines, cold chicken, cakes, oranges, apples, nuts, candies, punch, negus, and lemonade. But everything was good of its kind; the sandwiches were sandwiches, and not merely two huge slices of bread plastered with butter, concealing an irregular piece of sinew and fat, which in vain you try to sever with your teeth, till you find yourself obliged to drop the end out of your mouth, or else to pull the whole piece of meat out from between the bread, and allow it to hang on your chin till you cram it all into your mouth at once. His were not sandwiches of that kind, but, as we said before, sandwiches; the cakes had plenty of sugar in them, and so had the lemonade. But, above all, what made these little trifles the most enjoyable was the taste displayed by some one in the decoration of the table with a few evergreens, some white roses made out of turnip, and red roses out of beets, not to mention marigolds that once were carrots, nor the crisp frills of white paper which surrounded the large round cakes, nor the green leaves under the sandwiches, the abundance of snowy linen, shining knives and forks, and spoons. But we must conclude; what we wish particularly to impress upon the minds of our readers by thus dwelling on sandwiches and fine linen is, that you cannot afford to ignore one sense while you propose to gratify another; they are all intimately related and bound together like members of a fire company; if you offend one, all the others take it up.
[A] Should any of our friends not know how to produce an imitation of the banjo on a piano, we may as well inform them that it is done by simply laying a sheet of music over the strings during the performance.
CHAPTER IV.
In our last chapter we promised to explain the nature of the little instrument by which the Night-Howler produced those "hideous and unearthly noises" to which we alluded. We will now proceed to do so; and as this instrument is the same as that used by showmen in the play of Punch and Judy, we cannot do better, while we are about it, than instruct our readers how to get up a Punch and Judy show.