That same afternoon, the modern American Ritualistic Spire rises in duplicate illusion before the multiplying vision of a traveller recently off the ferry-boat, who, as though not satisfied with the length of his journey, makes frequent and unexpected trials of its width. The bells are ringing for vesper service; and, having fairly made the right door at last, after repeatedly shooting past and falling short of it, he reaches his place in the choir and performs voluntaries and involuntaries upon the organ, in a manner not distinguishable from almost any fashionable church-music of the period.
CHAPTER II.
A DEAN, AND A CHAP OR TWO ALSO.
Whosoever has noticed a party of those sedate and Germanesquely philosophical animals, the pigs, scrambling precipitately under a gate from out a cabbage-patch toward nightfall, may, perhaps, have observed, that, immediately upon emerging from the sacred vegetable preserve, a couple of the more elderly and designing of them assumed a sudden air of abstracted musing, and reduced their progress to a most dignified and leisurely walk, as though to convince the human beholder that their recent proximity to the cabbages had been but the trivial accident of a meditative stroll.
Similarly, service in the church being over, and divers persons of piggish solemnity of aspect dispersing, two of the latter detach themselves from the rest and try an easy lounge around toward a side door of the building, as though willing to be taken by the outer world for a couple of unimpeachable low-church gentlemen who merely happened to be in that neighborhood at that hour for an airing.
The day and year are waning, and the setting sun casts a ruddy but not warming light upon two figures under the arch of the side door; while one of these figures locks the door, the other, who seems to have a music book under his arm, comes out, with a strange, screwy motion, as though through an opening much too narrow for him, and, having poised a moment to nervously pull some imaginary object from his right boot and hurl it madly from him, goes unexpectedly off with the precipitancy and equilibriously concentric manner of a gentleman in his first private essay on a tight-rope.
"Was that Mr. BUMSTEAD, SMYTHE?"
"It wasn't anybody else, your Reverence."
"Say 'his identity with the person mentioned scarcely comes within the legitimate domain of doubt,' SMYTHE—to Father Dean, the younger of the piggish persons softly interposes,
"Is Mr. BUMSTEAD unwell, SMYTHE?"