d in stretching
his neck over the kennel, in order to take the fullest survey of its
topography which the scanty and agitated lamps would allow, the unhappy
wanderer, lowering his umbrella, suffered a cross and violent gust of
wind to rush, as if on purpose, against the interior. The rapidity with
which this was done, and the sudden impetus, which gave to the inflated
silk the force of a balloon, happening to occur exactly at the moment
Mr. Brown was stooping with such wistful anxiety over the pavement, that
gentleman, to his inexpressible dismay, was absolutely lifted, as it
were, from his present footing, and immersed in a running rivulet of
liquid mire, which flowed immediately below the pavement. Nor was this
all: for the wind, finding itself somewhat imprisoned in the narrow
receptacle it had thus abruptly entered, made so strenuous an exertion
to extricate itself, that it turned Lady Waddilove's memorable relic
utterly inside out; so that when Mr. Brown, aghast at the calamity of
his immersion, lifted his eyes to heaven, with a devotion that had in
it more of expostulation than submission, he beheld, by the melancholy
lamps, the apparition of his umbrella,--the exact opposite to its
legitimate conformation, and seeming, with its lengthy stick and
inverted summit, the actual and absolute resemblance of a gigantic
wineglass.

"Now," said Mr. Brown, with that ironical bitterness so common to
intense despair, "now, that's what I call pleasant."

As if the elements were guided and set on by all the departed souls
of those whom Mr. Brown had at any time overreached in his profession,
scarcely had the afflicted broker uttered this brief sentence, before
a discharge of rain, tenfold more heavy than any which had yet fallen,
tumbled down in literal torrents upon the defenceless head of the
itinerant.

"This won't do," said Mr. Brown, plucking up courage and splashing out
of the little rivulet once more into terra firma, "this won't do: I must
find a shelter somewhere. Dear, dear, how the wet runs down me! I am for
all the world like the famous dripping well in Derbyshire. What a beast
of an umbrella! I'll never buy one again of an old lady: hang me if I
do."

As the miserable Morris uttered these sentences, which gushed out,
one by one, in a broken stream of complaint, he looked round and
round--before, behind, beside--for some temporary protection or retreat.
In vain: the uncertainty of the light only allowed him to