A STUDY IN THE MODERN STYLE OF COLLOQUIAL FICTION.

[Scene, the chamber of Mr. and Mrs. Ellston, in an apartment hotel. Time, three A.M. The silence of the night is unbroken, save by the regular breathing of the sleepers, until suddenly, from the steam radiator, bursts a sound like the discharge of a battery of forty-pound guns.]

Mrs. E. (springing up in bed) Oh! eh? what is that?

[Her husband moves uneasily in his sleep, but does not reply. The noise of the sledge-hammer score of the “Anvil Chorus” rings out from the radiator.]

Mrs. E. George! George! Something is going to happen! Do wake up, or we shall be murdered in our sleep!

Mr. E. (with mingled ferocity and amusement) There is small danger of anybody’s being murdered in his sleep, my dear, where you are. It’s only that confounded radiator; it’s always making some sort of an infernal tumult. It can’t do any harm.

Mrs. E. But it will wake baby.

Mr. E. Well, if it does, the nurse can get him to sleep again, I suppose.

[From the room adjoining is heard a clattering din, as if all the kettles and pans in the house were being thrown violently across the floor.]

Mrs. E. There! The nursery radiator has begun. I must go and get baby.

Mr. E. Let baby alone. If the youngster will sleep, for heaven’s sake let him. The steam-pipes make noise enough for this time of night, one would think, without your taking the trouble to wake baby.

Mrs. E. (with volumes of reproach in her tone) Your own little baby! You never loved him as his mother does.

[The disturbances now assume the likeness to a thoroughly inebriated drum corps practising upon sheet-iron air-tight stoves.]

Mr. E. Of all unendurable rackets—

[A sudden and sharp boom interrupts him. Mrs. Ellston screams, while her husband indulges in language which, although somewhat inexcusably forcible, is yet to be regarded as not unnatural under the circumstances.]

Mrs. E. Oh, George, don’t swear. It always seems so much worse to swear in danger; like tempting Providence; and I know there’s going to be an explosion!

Mr. E. (severely) Don’t talk nonsense! The engineer has gone to sleep and left the drafts open, that’s all. Don’t be so absurd.

[There is another fusillade from the radiator, reinforced by the reverberations from the nursery, where a regiment of artillery seem to have begun target practice.]

Mrs. E. I will go and get my baby! I know— Oh, George, just hear it crash! Do get up and put the screen in front of it; that may turn off the pieces so they won’t come this way.

Mr. E. (scornfully) Pieces of what? Noise?

Mrs. E. How can you make fun? If the engineer has gone to sleep, he’s sure to blow up the whole hotel. I’m going to get up and dress myself, and take baby over to mother’s!

Mr. E. (with calm but cutting irony) At three o’clock in the morning? Shall you walk, or call a carriage?

Mrs. E. (beginning to sob in a dry and perfunctory fashion) Oh, you are too cruel! You are perfectly heartless. I wonder you don’t take that dear little innocent baby and hold him between you and the radiator for a shield.

Mr. E. That might be a good scheme, my dear, only the little beggar would probably howl so that I haven’t really the moral courage to wake him.

[The indignant reply of Mrs. Ellston is lost in the confused sound of the brays of a drove of brazen donkeys, which appear to be disporting themselves in the radiator. The noise of mighty rushing waters, the clanking of chains, the din of a political convention, the characteristic disturbances of a hundred factories and machine-shops, with the deafening whirr of all the elevated railways in the universe follow in turn.]

Mrs. E. I will go and get my baby, and I will go to mother’s; and, what is more, we will never, never come back!

Mr. E. Oh, just as you please about going, my dear; only you know that if you desert my bed and board, the law gives the boy to me.

Mrs. E. I don’t believe it’s any such thing; and if it is, it is because men made the law. Women wouldn’t take a baby away from its mother.

Mr. E. Have what theories you choose, my dear; only please let me get a few crumbs of sleep, now the radiator has had the mercy to subside.

Mrs. E. You are a brute, and I won’t ever speak to you again!

[She firmly assumes a stony silence, and the radiator, after a few concluding ejaculations and metallic objurgations, also relapses into comparative stillness. Mr. Ellston’s breathing begins to give strong indications that slumber has re-descended upon his weary frame.]

Mrs. E. (starting up with the inspiration of an entirely new and startling idea) George! George! George!

Mr. E. (with less good humor than might be desired) Eh?

Mrs. E. Wasn’t it wonderful for baby to sleep through it all?

Mr. E. (drowsily) Yes; droll little beggar. His mother wasn’t in the nursery to wake him, though.

Mrs. E. You don’t suppose there is anything the matter with him? George! George, I say! you don’t suppose the reason he sleeps so soundly is because he’s sick?

[To this conundrum Mr. Ellston offers no solution, and equally passes in silence queries in regard to the probability of the nurse’s being awake, alive, well-disposed, and able to take care of baby in case of emergency. Mrs. Ellston sighs with the desperation of long-suffering anguish, and once more stillness reigns in the chamber. The lady again arouses herself, however, from an apparently sound nap to ask, in penetrating tones,—]

“George, do you think it will begin all over again?”

(To which her brutal worser half grumbles out the reply) “No! and that’s where it is more endurable than a woman.”

[At which the radiator gives a chuckle so apt as to suggest the possession of a sinister consciousness on the part of that noisy instrument of torture. Mrs. Ellston groans, with the discouraged conviction that she is but one against two, and upon this theory at length consents to resume her interrupted slumbers.]

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