,--and
four weeks thereafter exhibited himself in public to a goodly number of
false prophets, who, excusing him and themselves on the ground of a
miracle, tendered him congratulations.

But if Karl Konstant was some the worse for wear, he was none the worse
for something to wear, having levied on a full cloth rig and watch,
belonging to one of the hospital doctors, as some remuneration for the
torturing exercises in surgery which had been directed at his corporosity.
Walking the streets with the air of a man whom melancholy has marked for
her own, and yet attracting the notice of passers-by through a subdued
emphasis of gait and manner, which could hardly have proceeded from a less
philosophic cause than good clothes, and a chronometer that would
unfailingly chronicle the hash hour, he was next interviewed by two
policemen with drawn clubs, who, by virtue of his late condition of
mayhem, subjected him to but one-half the regulation mauling, and having
divested him of his borrowed plumage, jugged him, and corked him, and
expressed through the bars a wish to kiss him for his mother-in-law.

About this time "Yellow Jack," in making his decennial tour of the
Southern cities of Texas, debarked at Columbus, and for a period of four
weeks lent his energies to a most devastating epidemic. Thousands were
stricken, hundreds rendered their final account, and the undertakers,
protesting that it was an ill-wind, took orders for coffins. Karl Konstant
Kain beheld the public dismay through his prison bars, and despaired. He
knew that it would come; fate had whispered him that it would come--and
feeling this, his anxiety on the subject soon developed into a wish that
it might come. He was not disappointed; and when it came and lodged a
great pain in his side, and touched up his pulse an half hundred degrees
or so, it did not conclude its labors, but promoted him to the hospital
and doctors, and bade him look about him for means of offsetting the
latter.

But we regret to state that, notwithstanding these small but disinterested
attentions, K. K. K., Esq., murmured, and the very day upon which he was
transferred to hospital sumptuousness, confronted his yellow-visaged enemy
with a challenge to do his worst. That individual hesitated, and objected
that the combat would prove an unequal one; but soon seeing that any
explanation which might be rendered would be construed into a possible
desire to avoid defeat (and becoming the least bit