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Tiffles bowed acknowledgment of the empty honor, and ushered the three clergymen and families to the front row of seats, of which C. Skimmerhorn, Esq., and his train, occupied as much as they could cover by spreading out. Mr.
Requesting Marcus to pocket the funds, shut up the shop, and leave the door to take care of itself, Tiffles marched boldly to his doom. Previous to extinguishing the candles in the exhibition hall, he went behind the curtain, and there found the idiot sitting patiently at the crank, and rehearsing, in a low tone, the code of signals which had been adopted. Patching was also there.
Tiffles, who had forced his way to his friend's side during the excitement, threw his arms about him, and said: "Never mind appearances, Marcus. I'll stake my life you are innocent of the charge, whatever it is." "Oh! you're a humbug," remarked C. Skimmerhorn, Esq. "Call me and my panorama a humbug, if you please; but Mr. Wilkeson is a gentleman and a man of honor."
Skimmerhorn recognized, in one of the clergymen, his beloved pastor, and proceeded, in a pleasant, off-hand manner, and a loud voice, to give a few of the reasons which inclined him to pronounce the panorama a humbug. "Being deadheads," sarcastically observed Tiffles to Marcus Wilkeson, "of course they come early, and take the best seats."
The walk was leisurely and uninterrupted, with two exceptions, when Wesley Tiffles broke suddenly from his companion, rushed into the entry of a photographic establishment, and examined numerous square feet of show portraits with profound interest. Marcus explained these impulsive movements on the supposition that Tiffles sought to escape from approaching duns.
The roguish boys, and the men too, and, chief of them, that practical humorist of a conductor, observing this, screamed, "Boo! boo! boo I boo!" all the louder. Tiffles knew that the critical time had come, and philosophically laughed at the ruin of his last grand project, as he had laughed at the ruin of forty other grand projects in their day. The panorama stopped without a signal this time.
"Blame it!" said he; "a'n't that splendid?" or, "By jingo! look at that!" or, "Thunder! don't that beat all?" The tigers' tails and the elephants' trunks, the alligators' snouts and the boa constrictor's convolutions, he recognized at once. He had "read all about 'em in Olney's Jogriffy." "He is an idiot of taste," thought Patching. "I wonder what they call him an idiot for?" thought Tiffles.
"No, unless yer want ter be." "Of course not of course not." But the interior Tiffles was disappointed at this sudden and unromantic termination of his case. A few more nights in the station house, or in the Tombs, would have given him capital material for a book, of which he had already projected the first chapter. He sat down, and execrated his ill luck.
In the upper story of this building, at the end of a long, hall, the floor of which was hollowed in places by the feet of half a century, was the room, or office, as he called it, of Mr. Wesley Tiffles. There was no number, or sign, on the door, but only a card bearing the inscription, in a bold hand, "Back in five minutes." Mr.
The other occasion was daybreak, December 30, 185-, when the works began to move of their own accord, and did not stop for six seconds. This record had evidently been made by the inventor for his private reference, and concealed in the brass drum for safe keeping. Tiffles read with bated breath; and Marcus listened in astonishment. "What do you think of it?" asked Marcus.
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