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"I was born in the west of England," Gulpin began, "and although you may doubt my story when I tell you that my family is rich and honored, and the only blot upon the name was when I was accused of crime, yet such is the fact. I am the youngest of three sons. My brothers are in the army, and hold commissions, and are no doubt, by this time, if alive, high in rank and power.

No magic dwelling-place in magic story, shut up in the heart of a thick wood, was ever more solitary and deserted to the fancy, than was her father's mansion in its grim reality, as it stood lowering on the street: always by night, when lights were shining from neighbouring windows, a blot upon its scanty brightness; always by day, a frown upon its never-smiling face.

Here, we have actual proof that seventy-five thousand in the ranks of this vast army of poverty-stricken people, were reduced to such straits, by causes which they could not control. How dreadful the significance of these terrible figures! What a blot they become, on the fair page of progress achieved by the nineteenth century! What a warning to the people of the twentieth!

The greatest blot upon Burke, I need hardly say, is that his passions blinded him in his age, to this, as we now see, inevitable conclusion. The old-fashioned view, I fancy, is a relic of that view of history in which all the great events and changes were personified in some individual hero.

Seeing him over there, looking down on the town which to him is accursed, we have often thought how weary God must be looking at the world and knowing so much better than Silas the weakness and iniquity of men. Sometimes we have wondered if sin is really as important as Silas thinks it is, for with Silas sin is a blot that effaces a man's soul.

The library was now completely dark, and she was surprised to see how much faint light the outer world still held. As she peered out into it across the court, a figure shaped itself in the tapering perspective of bare lines: it looked a mere blot of deeper gray in the grayness, and for an instant, as it moved toward her, her heart thumped to the thought, "It's the ghost!"

To the right, the fairyland of the Champs-Elysees, the trees tossing under the sudden blast; in front, the black trench of the river. On, on let him see it all gather it all into his accusing heart and brain, and then at a stroke blot out the inward and the outward vision, and 'cease upon the midnight with no pain'!

Well had it been for Nelson if he had made no other sacrifices to this unhappy attachment than his peace of mind; but it led to the only blot upon his public character.

"Best suits my fate, best suits the hue, in this misfortune's day; Not green, not white nor purple, but the palmer's garb of gray. I ask no plumes for helm or cap of nature's living green, For hope has vanished from my life of that which might have been! And from my target will I blot the blazon that is vain The lynx whose eyes are fixed upon the prey that it would gain.

For now she understood all that, in recent days had tortured her like an unexplained blot, an alien daub in the face which every one sees but he whom it disfigures. Now she knew what the smiling hints of her friends and the consoling desires of men had meant. Now she recognised the reason why she was wounded by the attention of all. She was "the wife of the man whom Madame Nelson ..."