essary to force a passage through
frequent heaps of rubbish, it was by no means seldom that the hand fell
upon a skeleton or rested upon a more fleshly corpse.

Suddenly, as the seamen stumbled against the entrance of a tall and
ghastly-looking building, a yell more than usually shrill from the
throat of the excited Legs, was replied to from within, in a rapid
succession of wild, laughter-like, and fiendish shrieks. Nothing daunted
at sounds which, of such a nature, at such a time, and in such a place,
might have curdled the very blood in hearts less irrevocably on fire,
the drunken couple rushed headlong against the door, burst it open, and
staggered into the midst of things with a volley of curses.

The room within which they found themselves proved to be the shop of
an undertaker; but an open trap-door, in a corner of the floor near the
entrance, looked down upon a long range of wine-cellars, whose depths
the occasional sound of bursting bottles proclaimed to be well stored
with their appropriate contents. In the middle of the room stood a
table--in the centre of which again arose a huge tub of what appeared
to be punch. Bottles of various wines and cordials, together with
jugs, pitchers, and flagons of every shape and quality, were scattered
profusely upon the board. Around it, upon coffin-tressels, was seated a
company of six. This company I will endeavor to delineate one by one.

Fronting the entrance, and elevated a little above his companions, sat a
personage who appeared to be the president of the table. His stature was
gaunt and tall, and Legs was confounded to behold in him a figure
more emaciated than himself. His face was as yellow as saffron--but
no feature excepting one alone, was sufficiently marked to merit a
particular description. This one consisted in a forehead so unusually
and hideously lofty, as to have the appearance of a bonnet or crown
of flesh superadded upon the natural head. His mouth was puckered and
dimpled into an expression of ghastly affability, and his eyes, as
indeed the eyes of all at table, were glazed over with the fumes
of intoxication. This gentleman was clothed from head to foot in a
richly-embroidered black silk-velvet pall, wrapped negligently around
his form after the fashion of a Spanish cloak.--His head was stuck full
of sable hearse-plumes, which he nodded to and fro with a jaunty and
knowing air; and, in his right hand, he held a huge human thigh-bone,
with which he app