AN EXTRAVAGANZA.

IT was a chilly November afternoon. I had just consummated an unusually
hearty dinner, of which the dyspeptic _truffe_ formed not the least
important item, and was sitting alone in the dining-room, with my feet
upon the fender, and at my elbow a small table which I had rolled up
to the fire, and upon which were some apologies for dessert, with some
miscellaneous bottles of wine, spirit and _liqueur_. In the morning I
had been reading Glover's "Leonidas," Wilkie's "Epigoniad," Lamartine's
"Pilgrimage," Barlow's "Columbiad," Tuckermann's "Sicily," and
Griswold's "Curiosities"; I am willing to confess, therefore, that I now
felt a little stupid. I made effort to arouse myself by aid of frequent
Lafitte, and, all failing, I betook myself to a stray newspaper in
Having carefully perused the column of "houses to let," and
the column of "dogs lost," and then the two columns of "wives and
apprentices runaway," I attacked with great resolution the editorial
matter, and, reading it from beginning to end without understanding a
syllable, conceived the possibility of its being Chinese, and so re-read
it from the end to the beginning, but with no more satisfactory result.
I was about throwing away, in disgust,

when I felt my attention somewhat aroused by the paragraph which
follows:

"The avenues to death are numerous and strange. A London paper mentions
the decease of a person from a singular cause. He was playing at 'puff
the dart,' which is played with a long needle inserted in some worsted,
and blown at a target through a tin tube. He placed the needle at the
wrong end of the tube, and drawing his breath strongly to puff the dart
forward with force, drew the needle into his throat. It entered the
lungs, and in a few days killed him."

Upon seeing this I fell into a great rage, without exactly knowing
why. "This thing," I exclaimed, "is a contemptible falsehood--a poor
hoax--the lees of the invention of some pitiable penny-a-liner--of some
wretched concoctor of accidents in Cocaigne. These fellows, knowing
the extravagant gullibility of the age, set their wits to work in the
imagination of improbable possibilities---of odd accidents, as they
term them; but to a reflecting intellect (like mine," I added, in
parenthesis, putting my forefinger unconsciously to the side of my
nose,) "to a contemplative understanding such as I myself possess, it
seems evident at once that the marvelous increase of late in these 'odd
accidents' is by far the oddest accident of all. For my own part,
I intend to believe nothing henceforward that has anything of the
'singular' about it."

vat a vool you bees for dat!" replied one of the most
remarkable voices I ever heard. At first I took it for a rumbling in my
ears--such as a man sometimes experiences when getting very drunk--but,
upon second thought, I considered the sound as more nearly resembling
that which proceeds from an empty barrel beaten with a big stick; and,
in fact, this I should have concluded it to be, but for the articulation
of the syllables and words. I am by