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352 "Quite sure, Mr. Paul Vasher; quite sure!"

Here our conversation becomes indistinct and ridiculous. And in our little green parlour leave us, oh reader! to our idiocy, and cast your memory back to the days when you loved and were beloved, and your happiness was but freshly born to you; remembering that time, you will, while smiling at our folly, understand it

has come upon us with a garment of rain and fog, with leaden skies and sodden earth, and the land looks like one vast mournful burying ground, with its fallen leaves, dead plants, and flowerless brown stalks. Nature is shrouded, motionless, bound hand and foot beneath her covering of decay, and looking abroad it is hard to believe that spring will ever come back, that green shoots will thrust their way through the sullen earth, tender buds spring out of yonder bare brown trees. The gloominess of the weather has its outcome in the newspapers, where murder succeeds murder with sinister rapidity, and the heavy, deathly air seems to prompt the souls of men to deeds of rapine, crime, and slaughter. But to me these sluggish days bring no sense of dulness and oppression, I am not even longing for spring, with the passion of longing I used to know all through the dead, silent, winter months. I have Paul now, and he is life, and home, and love, and seasons bound up in one, and since he is mine I lack nothing. The chill winds have shaken every leaf from the trees in our green parlour, the ground is all dank and dripping, it knows our faces