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The wooden ceiling was cut up into lozenges of black and gold, and was edged by minute inscriptions from the Koran, in gold on a black ground. All the windows had lattices of mashrebeeyeh work fitted to them, and all these lattices were closed.

His shop window, seldom dusted or set in order, held a few clay pipes, some glass jars of peppermint or sassafras lozenges, black licorice, stick-candy, and sugar gooseberries. These dainties were seldom renewed, for it was only a very bold child, or one with an ungovernable appetite for sweets, who would have spent his penny at Foxy Baxter's store.

"It's no kind o' use givin' me goodies," she said to a helpless suitor of Louisiana Piper's who had offered to bring her some sweets, "for I ain't got no influence with Lu, and if I don't give 'em up to her when she hears of it, she'll nag me and hate you like pizen. Unless," she added thoughtfully, "it was wintergreen lozenges; Lu can't stand them, or anybody who eats them within a mile."

These were very homely little interchanges of friendship, but they made part of the happy childish world to Grace, and years after, when the old pew knew her no more, and she asked admittance to it as a stranger, she glanced round in the vain hope of catching a glimpse of the broad, shining, kindly faces of the old couple, feeling that to see them in their place would bring back many pleasanter bygone associations than snuff and peppermint lozenges.

"You are a bishop in the Church of Christ on Earth," he summed it up. "And you want to become a detached and wandering Ancient Mariner from your shipwreck of faith with something to explain that nobody wants to hear. You are going out I suppose you have means?" The old man awaited the answer to his abrupt enquiry with a handful of lozenges.

But in the end he continued beyond the Essex House with its iron bow and lamp over the entrance, past Cheapside to Webb's Drugstore, where he purchased a bag of Peristaltic lozenges, and after pretending to start away as if nothing more were to be secured there the Gibraltars.

How is the son of a British yeoman, who has been fed principally on salt pork and yeast dumplings, to know that there is satiety for the human stomach even in a paradise of glass jars full of sugared almonds and pink lozenges, and that the tedium of life can reach a pitch where plum-buns at discretion cease to offer the slightest excitement?

Sometimes the "Spiral boss" was irritable, and chewed more lozenges than ever. Even then, however, he was not offensive, but one of those people who hurt themselves by their own irritability more than they hurt other people. "Haven't you done that YET?" he would cry. "Go on, be a month of Sundays." Again, and Paul could understand him least then, he was jocular and in high spirits.

On the lower shelves were canisters of tea, coffee, and spices, and glass candy jars, which looked very inviting to Susie. Some were filled with gay-striped sticks. There were also jars of peppermint lozenges, star and heart-shaped, with pink mottoes on their white faces. On the upper shelves were rows upon rows of cans covered with gay pictures of fruits and vegetables.

Within the court there is generally a noble colonnade all round, and an open corridore above, but the stairs are usually narrow, steep, and high, the want of sash-windows, the dullness of their small glass lozenges, the dusty brick floors, and the crimson hangings laced with gold, contribute to give a gloomy air to their apartments; I might add to these causes, a number of Pictures executed on melancholy subjects, antique mutilated statues, busts, basso relieves, urns, and sepulchral stones, with which their rooms are adorned.