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Various were the rubbings of hands and sinister smiles which punctuated this epistle, until at last, on its being finished, he carefully folded it, and taking from his pocket-book a sealed envelope, one end of which had been previously opened with great care, and the superscription completely removed by a cunning process, he took from another compartment of his book a small note and introduced it into the envelope, adroitly closing the apperture with a little mucilage, so as to completely conceal the incision that had been made, and obliterate every evidence of the envelope's having been tampered with.
In front of the Medium, as he sat at the table with his back to the wall, were the usual writing materials, lead pencils and mucilage bottle, and beyond them, on the edge of the table farthest from the Medium, and between him and the rest of the room, was a row of books, octavos, etc., extending the whole length of the table and terminating in a tin box, like a deed box, with pamphlets on it.
Lina assumed charge of the head-dresses. She took Billy first, rubbed the mucilage well into his sunny curls, and filled his head full of his aunt's turkey feathers, leaving them to stick out awkwardly in all directions and at all angles.
"Oh!" he cried, in dismay, and his face grew terribly red, "did I upset that?" pointing to the mucilage bottle. "You surely did," said Gibson tartly, and taking up the last of the sticky mess with a wet towel, "and I suppose you'll do it again, or some of the rest of you boys will. It don't make much difference which," and she moved off slowly. "Gibson Gibson," said Mrs. Sterling gently.
The parlor door was kept carefully locked all that long afternoon. The children tried to play with the things that had come in their stockings, but somehow these didn't seem as interesting as what they guessed was going on behind the closed door. So they kept their eyes glued there, as Marmaduke's story-book said, though he thought that was funny, when they hadn't put any mucilage on them.
Upon closer inspection, however, and upon turning the envelope so as to catch the light, I thought that a slight glazing of gum was discernible around the central seal, and from beneath its edge a minute bubble of mucilage protruded.
In a moment the mucilage of the envelope was dissolved, and the letter could easily be opened without showing in any way that it had ever been broken open. And now the old man read the following words: "You are victorious, M. de Brevan. When you read this, I shall be no longer alive. "You may raise your head again; you are relieved of all fears. Daniel can come back.
But if one man cracks where you can’t finish the deal, even by the most unlimited outlay of mucilage and persistence, and another blazes his whole surface-area in a manner that seems to make the underbrush dubious to count on forever henceforth; why, you then have a logarithm the square of which is probably as far beyond your depth as I am beyond my own just at this point of this sentence.
He went to a table which reached almost the full length of the room, picked up a piece of white paper, sat down, and wrote with red ink: “Daniel Nothafft. Musician. Two months in jail.” He then covered the paper with mucilage, pasted it on a wooden box which looked like a miniature sentry-house, and nailed a lid on the box, using tacks that were lying ready for this purpose.
On a high shelf in the playroom I had seen some supplementary volumes of "Mercantile Agency" reports which would in time reach the rag-bag; there was a bottle of mucilage in the library-desk, and the children owned an old pair of scissors. Then I left them, recalling something from Newman Hall's address on "The Dignity of Labor."
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