writer could write a Novel in the exact style of COLLINS, or TROLLOPE,
or DICKENS: only laying its scenes and having its characters in this
country; the work would be as romantically effective as one by COLLINS,
or TROLLOPE, or DICKENS; and that the possibly necessary incidental
mention of such native places as Schermerhorn Street, Dobb's Ferry, or
Chicago, _wouldn't_ disturb the nicest dramatic illusion of the
imaginative tale. Very well, then! All right! Just look here!--O A.P's
Young Gentlemen, just look here--]




CHAPTER I.


DAWNATION.


A modern American Ritualistic Spire! How can the modern American
Ritualistic Spire be here! The well-known tapering brown Spire, like a
closed umbrella on end? How can that be here? There is no rusty rim of a
shocking bad hat between the eye and that Spire in the real prospect.
What is the rusty rim that now intervenes, and confuses the vision of at
least one eye? It must be an intoxicated hat that wants to see, too. It
is so, for ritualistic choirs strike up, acolytes swing censers
dispensing the heavy odor of punch, and the ritualistic rector and his
gaudily robed assistants in alb, chasuble, maniple and tunicle, intone a
_Nux Vomica_ in gorgeous procession. Then come twenty young clergymen in
stoles and birettas, running after twenty marriageable young ladies of
the congregation who have sent them worked slippers. Then follow ten