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