Spirits of waiters, soldiers, tailors (Damphool trembled), babies, saloon-keepers, dancers, actors, widows, circus-riders, in fact all varieties of obstreperous sprites, began to play the devil with things generally.
The dining table jumped up, turned two somersets, and landed with one leg in the widow's lap, one in Damphool's mouth, and the other two on the toes of the sanctimonious-looking individuals opposite.
The washstand exhibited strong symptoms of a desire to dance the Jenny Lind polka on Bull Dogge's head.
The book-case beat time with extraordinary vigor, and made faces at the company generally.
Our walking canes and umbrellas promenaded round the room in couples, without the slightest regard to corns or other pedal vegetables; while the bedstead in the corner was extemporizing a comic song, with a vigorous accompaniment on the soap-dish, the wash-dish, and other bed-room furniture.
Bull Dogge here made a rush for the door, and dashed wildly down Broadway, pursued, as he avers to this day, by the spirit of an Irishman, with a pickaxe, a handsaw, and a ghostly wheelbarrow.
Concluding I had seen enough, I took Damphool and B. D——'s bottle (empty, or he would never have left it), and went home, satisfied that "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of," except by lying "mediums," so called; who too lazy to work, and too cowardly to get an honorable living by stealing, adopt this method to sponge their bread and butter out of those, whom God in his mysterious wisdom has seen fit to send on earth weak enough to believe their idiotic ravings.
XXX.
Special Express from Dog Paradise—A Canine Ghost.
I regret the strong language used in the preceding chapter, for since it was penned I have become a firm believer in ghosts, "spheres," saltatory furniture, and the other doctrines of professed Spiritualists.