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the history of Mr. Francis Beveridge, as supplied by the obliging candor of the Baron von Blitzenberg and the notes of Dr. Escott, Dr. Twiddel and his friend Robert Welsh make a kind of explanatory entry. They most effectually set the bail a-rolling, and so the story starts in a small room looking out on a very uninteresting London street.

It was about three o'clock on a November afternoon, that season of fogs and rains and mud, when townspeople long for fresh air and hill-sides, and country-folk think wistfully of the warmth and lights of a city, when nobody is satisfied, and everybody has a cold. Outside the window of the room there were a few feet of earth adorned with a low bush or two, a line of railings, a stone-paved street, and on the other side a long row of uniform yellow brick houses.