Killed By The Natives.

When you have read what I have to recount you will sturdily asseverate that you could better spare a better story . And , a penultimate digression—by way of illustrative introduction . Poor Albert Smith used to conjure up the verbally depicted counterfeit presentment and image of a dreadful engineer on board a Mediterranean steamboat—an utterly unendurable oracular Jack Bunsby ( only worse ) of a man , who used to spin a yarn of the most

incomprehensible , utterly dull , wholly pointless , absolutely witless , inexpressibl y meaningless character—a maundering , parenthetical , involved , monotonous discourse —a threnody , where verbs might have the most contagious fevers , and nominatives enjoy an absolute impunity from catching them—a string of unconnected words that seemed as if cut out of the middle of some illiterate disquisition , so wholly wanting , was itof either beginning or end—a brain-bewildering lucubrationthat reminded

, , you of nothing so much as the proverbial railway train that , starting at no time from anywhere , and arriving at any time at nowhere , stops at all stations on the way—a very rhapsody of words , only not rhapsodical , possessing neither end , nor moral , nor application at all to anything whatever . " It was the dullest and most stupid story I ever heard in my life , " the entertainer would inform his deli ghted audience , " ancl I am about to tell it to you . "

Now , I am about to relate a similar narrative . A mystery without a solution . A story without a plot . As positively a very last digression , I will let you into the secret of one of my tastes , that I am veryfond of plots ; but I must , at the same time , candidly confess that I am not great in concocting them . I can't invent a plot . I regard with never ceasing wonder Messrs . Fawkes , Winter , ancl Company—that very notorious " Long firm " who devised the Gunpowder Plotwhen Scottish Jamie was King . M

, y interest in the Meal-tub Plot , and the Rye House Plot , in his grandson ' s time , never flags . Why , to this clay , there is nothing in the world I so much enjoy as a trip down into Hertfordshire to inspect the locus in quo of the conspiracy which cost Lord William Russell his head . As Macaulay tells us of the country parsons , who , anticipating the introduction of the Inquisition into England , boasted of their courage in facing the ordeal of the stake and faggots , and

" talked louder and louder , Of how they would dress for the show , And where they would fasten the powder , And i £ they should Mlow or no : " so , my brethren , I love to wander in those Broxbourne meadows , and mark the place in the narrow lane where Old Rowley ' s clumsy earache was to be obstructed , and speculate from between which mullionsfrom which narrow quarrel-lazed * slit

grey , g , the flash and the puff was intended to issue in that wild device ' to change a sovereign . The more , then , that I admire plots the more keenly do I feel and regret my inability to devise one . Ancl so you must , perforce , put up with a whoU y plotless story , ancl—here goes . At an early period of this exercitation you may recall that I " owned up , " as our American cousins say , to ajicnc / iontfor oysters . The other day—a cold wintry

noon—I resolved upon treating myself to a modest dozen , by way of lunch , a resolution confirmed by finding myself , at the usual period for that refection , opposite a newly-opened , smartly embellished , cleanly jn-ovided shop , for the sale of oysters only , in Little Stuart Place , which , as everybody knows , turns out of Great Plantagenet Street , in the W . C . district . I had known that tiny boutique for years . As one man in his time plays many parts , so may—so does—one shop frequently change its staple . I bad known this establishment doing a roaring cigar business . I had seen it blazing with ribbons of a cheap haberdashery character , from which it descended abruptly , and without the slightest notice , into the comestible line—its panes clouded with fumes from a gigantic