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mless and position to the placeless. Neither did his thoughts spread themselves out and link themselves as I have displayed them. They came confusedly into his mind like a heap of broken mosaics,--sometimes a part of the picture complete in itself, sometimes connected fragments, and sometimes only single severed stones. They did not diffuse a light of celestial joy over his countenance. On the contrary, the Poor Relation's remark turned him pale, as I have said; and when the terrible wrinkled and jaundiced looking-glass turned him green in addition, and he saw himself in it, it seemed to him as if it were all settled, and his book of life were to be shut not yet half-read, and go back to the dust of the under-ground archives. He coughed a mild short cough, as if to point the direction in which his downward path was tending. It was an honest little cough enough, so far as appearances went. But coughs are ungrateful things. You find one out in the cold, take it up and nurse it and make everything of it, dress it up warm, give it all sorts of balsams and other food it likes, and carry it round in your bosom as if it were a miniature lapdog. And by-and-by its little bark grows sharp and savage, and--confound the thing!--you find it is a wolf's whelp that you have got there, and he is gnawing in the breast where he has been nestling so long.--The Poor Relation said that somebody's surrup was good for folks that were gettin' into a bad way.--The landlady had heard of desperate cases cured by cherry-pictorial. Whiskey's the fellah,--said the young man John.--Make it into punch, cold at dinner-time 'n' hot at bed-time. I'll come up 'n' show you how to mix it. Have n't any of you seen the wonderful fat man exhibitin' down in Hanover Street? Master Benjamin Franklin rushed into the dialogue with a breezy exclamation, that he had seen a great picter outside of the place where the fat man was exhibitin'. Tried to get in at half-price, but the man at the door looked at his teeth and said he was more'n ten year old. It is n't two years,--said the young man John, since that fat fellah was exhibitin' here as the Livin' Skeleton. Whiskey--that's what did it,--real Burbon's the stuff. Hot water, sugar, 'n' jest a little shavin' of lemon-skin in it,--skin, mind you, none o' your juice; take it off thin,--shape of one of them flat curls the factory-girls wear on the sides of their foreheads. But I am a teetotaller,--s
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