The owner of those eyes, and of a surprising head of florid hair, had
barely time to draw back into the shadow of the corridor and notice an
approaching face like that of one walking in his sleep, when the
clove-eater swung disjointedly by him, with jingling lantern, and went
fiercely bumping down the stairway. Closely, without sound, followed the
watcher, and the two, like man and shadow, went out from the house into
the quarry of the moon-eyed black leopard.

Fully bound now in the sinister spell of the spice of the Molucca
islands, Mr. BUMSTEAD had regained that condition of his duplex
existence to which belonged the disposition he had made of his lethargic
nephew and alpaca umbrella on that confused Christmas night; and with
such realization of a distinct duality came back to him at least a
partial recollection of where he had put the cherished two. Finding Mr.
E. DROOD rather overcome by the more festive features of the
meal,--notwithstanding his walk at midnight with Mr. PENDRAGON,--he had
allowed his avuncular displeasure thereat to betray itself in a
threshing administered with the umbrella. Observing that the young man
still slept beside the chair from which he fell, he had ultimately, and
with the umbrella still under his arm raised the dishevelled nephew
head-downward in his arms, and impatiently conveyed him from the heated
room and house to the coolest retreat he could think of. There
depositing him, and, in his hurry, the umbrella also, to sleep off,
under reviving atmospheric influences, the unseemly effect of the
evening's banquet, he had gone back on both sides of the road to his
boarding-house, and, with his boots upon the pillow, sunk into an
instantaneous sleep of unfathomable depth. Dreaming, towards morning,
that he was engaging a large boa-constrictor in single combat, and
struggling energetically to restrain the ferocious reptile from getting