thousand black monkies swarming all over everybody and up and down
everything, chattering like fiends. Still the Ritualistic Spire keeps
turning up in impossible places, and still the intervening rusty rim of
a hat inexplicably clouds one eye. There dawns a sensation as of
writhing grim figures of snakes in one's boots, and the intervening
rusty rim of the hat that was not in the original prospect takes a
snake-like--But stay! Is this the rim of my own hat tumbled all awry? I'
mushbe! A few reflective moments, not unrelieved by hiccups, mush be
d'voted to co'shider-ERATION of th' posh'bil'ty.

Nodding excessively to himself with unspeakable gravity, the gentleman
whose diluted mind has thus played the Dickens with him, slowly arises
to an upright position by a series of complicated manoeuvres with both
hands and feet; and, having carefully balanced himself on one leg, and
shaking his aggressive old hat still farther down over his left eye,
proceeds to take a cloudy view of his surroundings. He is in a room
going on one side to a bar, and on the other side to a pair of glass
doors and a window, through the broken panes of which various musty
cloth substitutes for glass ejaculate toward the outer Mulberry Street.
Tilted back in chairs against the wall, in various attitudes of
dislocation of the spine and compound fracture of the neck, are an
Alderman of the ward, an Assistant-Assessor, and the lady who keeps the
hotel. The first two are shapeless with a slumber defying every law of
comfortable anatomy; the last is dreamily attempting to light a stumpy
pipe with the wrong end of a match, and shedding tears, in the dim
morning ghastliness, at her repeated failures.

"Thry another," says this woman, rather thickly, to the gentleman
balanced on one leg, who is gazing at her and winking very much. "Have
another, wid some bitters."