Invite PENDRAGON to dinner on Christmas
Eve, when only we three shall be together, and we'll shake hands. Ever,
dear clove-y JACK, yours truly, EDWIN DROOD."
"You think Mr. PENDRAGON will accept, then?" said the Gospeler.
Mr. BUMSTEAD nodded darkly, shook hands, bowed to a large armchair for
Mrs. SIMPSON, and retired with much stateliness.
[Footnote A: The Adapter refers confidently to any Southern female novel
of the period for proof, that sentimental Magnolian school-girls always
talk, or write, everything educational, except good English, when
conferring with their deafened masculine friends.]
CHAPTER XI.
A PICTURE AND A PARCEL.
Behind the most sample-roomey, fire-insuranceish, and express-wagonized
part of Broadway, New York, yawns a venerable street called Nassau;
wherein architecture is a monster of such hideous mien that to be hated
needs but to be rented, and more full-grown men stare into shoe-stores
and shirt-emporiums without buying anything than in any other part of
the world. Near the lower end of this quaint avenue rises the
Post-Office, sending aloft a wooden steeple which is the coffin of a
dead clock, and looking, altogether, like some good, old-fashioned
country church, which, having come to town many years ago to see its
city cousins, and been discouraged by their brown-stone airs, retired,
much demoralized, into a shady by-way, and there fell from grace into a
kind of dissipated cross between Poor-House and railroad depot.
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