Punchinello, Volume 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870

Judge SWEENEY, with a certain supercilious consciousness that he is figuring in a novel, and that it will not do for him to thwart the eccentricities of mysterious fiction by any commonplace deference to the mere meteorological weaknesses of ordinary human nature, does not allow the fact that late December is a rather bleak and cold time of year to deter him from taking daily airings in the neighborhood of the Ritualistic churchyard. Since the inscription of his epitaph on his late wife upon her monument therein, the churchyard is to him a kind of ponderous work of imagination with marble leaves, to which he has contributed the most brilliant chapter; and when he sees any stranger hovering about a part of the outer railings from whence the inscription may be read, it is with all the swelling pride of an author who, having procured the publication of some dreary article in a magazine, is thrown into an ecstacy of vanity if he sees but one person glance at that number of the periodical on a news-stand.

Since his first meeting with Mr. BUMSTEAD, on the evening of the epitaph-reading, Judge SWEENEY has cultivated that gentleman's acquaintance, and been received at his lodgings several times with