earest schoolmates would say, that they had always
loved her, despite her great faults, yet could not disguise from
themselves that she seemed at last to be fairly running after Miss
PENDRAGON'S brother. Besides, Mr. BUMSTEAD, offended by the seeming want
of confidence in him evinced by her flight, would, probably, take
measures publicly to identify MAGNOLIA'S alpaca garment with the
covering of his lost umbrella, and thus direct new suspicion against a
sister and brother already bothered almost into hysterics.

During the last few weeks, an attack of dyspepsia had laid the
foundation of a mind in the Flowerpot, as it generally does in other
young female American boarding-school thinkers, and she was now capable
of that subtle line of reasoning which is the great commendation of her
sex to a recognized perfect intellectual equality with man. Once
decided, by her apprehension of a General European War, against marriage
with J. BUMSTEAD, she took a rather irritable view of that too
attractive devotional musician, and inferred, from his not being wealthy
enough to stand the test of possible transatlantic hostilities, that he
must, himself, have killed EDWIN DROOD. His umbrella, it was well known,
had been present at that fatal Christmas dinner; and a thoughtless
insult offered to it, even by his nephew, might have made a demon of
him. Suppose that EDWIN, upon returning to the dining-room that night,
after his temporary exercise in the open air with MONTGOMERY PENDRAGON,
had found his uncle, flushed with cloves, endeavoring to force a social
glass of lemon tea upon the umbrella, under the impression that it was a
person, and had unthinkingly accused him thereat of being momentarily
unsettled in his faculties? Probably, then, hot words would have passed
between them; each telling the other that he would have a nice headache
in the morning and find it impossible not to look very sleepy even if he
fixed his hair ever so elaborately. Blows might have followed: the
uncle, in his anger, hewing the nephew limb from limb with the carving
knife from the table, and subsequently carrying away the remains to the
Pond and there casting them in. Suppose, in his natural excitement, the
uncle had hurriedly used the umbrella, opened and held downward, to
carry the remains in; and, after coming home again, and snatching a nap
under the table, had forgotten all about it, and thus been ever since
inconsolable for his alpaca loss? As the young o