"
JOHN MCLAUGHLIN, who now enters, is a stone-cutter and mason, much
employed in patching dilapidated graves and cutting inscriptions,
and popularly known in Bumsteadville, on account of the dried mortar
perpetually hanging about him, as "Old Mortarity." He is a ricketty man,
with a chronic disease called bar-roomatism, and so very grave-yardy in
his very '_Hic_' that one almost expects a _jacet_ to follow it as a
matter of course.
"JOHN MCLAUGHLIN," says Judge SWEENEY, handing him the paper with the
Epitaph, "there is the inscription for the stone."
"I guess I can get it all on, sir," says MCLAUGHLIN. "Your servant, Mr.
BUMSTEAD."
"Ah, JOHN MCLAUGHLIN, how are you?" says Mr. BUMSTEAD, his hand with the
tumbler vaguely wandering toward where the bowl formerly stood. "By the
way, JOHN MCLAUGHLIN, how came you to be called 'Old Mortarity'? It
has a drunken sound, JOHN MCLAUGHLIN, like one of Sir WALTER SCOTT'S
characters disguised in liquor."
"Never you mind about that," says MCLAUGHLIN. "I carry the keys of the
Bumsteadville[1] churchyard vaults, and can tell to an atom, by a tap
of my trowel, how fast a skeleton is dropping to dust in the pauper
burial-ground.
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