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He went back to the door where the bags of grain had stood. A drunken sailor came swinging along. He stood still and let him pass; there must be no witnesses. The sailor turned the next corner. Neither up nor down nor across the street, nor at dust-begrimed, cobwebbed window, was there any sound or motion.
"If you think me so, dear," she whispered happily, "it's all I ask." And they went in to dinner as to a ceremony. It was indeed a ceremony filled for her with some occult, sacred, meaning that she could not put into words. A feast symbolical. Starling was sent to the wine-cellar to bring back a cobwebbed Madeira near a century old, brought out on rare occasions in the family.
Sandie has a couple of servants, man and wife, who rule him with a rod of iron, but I would forgive that for the cooking and the loyalty. After dinner he disappeared with a look of mystery, and came back with a cobwebbed bottle of the old shape, short and bunchy, which he carried as if it were a baby.
But in the place of "Pratt's Garden" was an open park, and the old house where Robert Morris held his court in a former generation was changing to a public restaurant. A suspension bridge cobwebbed itself across the Schuylkill where that audacious arch used to leap the river at a single bound, an arch of greater span, as they loved to tell us, than was ever before constructed.
There, up among the dark cobwebbed shadows, he thought he saw something white. He held up the candle. It was, yes, it was a tiny corner of white paper wedged into a crack; by standing on the beam at the side he could just reach it. He touched it, pulled it; it came out slowly, another of Esther's letters. They were hid in the upper staircase!
Since then it had lain untouched till to-day. Manetho brooded over the dim magnificence of its folds, sitting amidst the cobwebbed rubbish, a narrow glint of sunshine creeping slope-downwards from the crevice above his head. He smoothed the fabric abstractedly with his hand, recalling the thoughts and scenes of four-and-twenty years ago.
It was musty, cobwebbed, and encrusted with stalactic nitre, but the spirit of rare old vintages exhaled from its depths, and visionary clusters of purplest grapes dangled in every direction. And first your eye lighted upon a half dozen real old India Port, picked up by golden chance at an assignee's sale in Rivington Street.
We like to read of the small, bare room, with cobwebbed ceiling and narrow window, in which the poor child of genius sits with his magical pen, the master of a realm of beauty and enchantment. I think the open fire does not kindle the imagination so much as it awakens the memory; one sees the past in its crumbling embers and ashy grayness, rather than the future.
The battered pewter counter, with little pools of dirty liquid in its hollows; the green-painted, flat-bellied barrels with bands of faded gilding; the moist and filthy sawdust on the floor, with last week's odours in it and a mere sprinkling of clean sawdust on top, offering its hint of the timber-stacks in the yard next door to home; the winking gas with the fog-halo round it; the shirt-sleeved barman; the female habitual drunkard here for a dram thus early, and holding her glass in both shaking palms as if she warmed her hands at it; the ceiling, cobwebbed and clouded with gas-smoke; the gaping door, like a dead jaw that would have dropped but for the straps that held it all these things beat themselves in on his intelligence as if they would make an eternal pressure there.
There, where morbidity lurked most thickly, I searched and poked during long afternoons when the sunlight filtered in through the cobwebbed above-ground windows, and a sense of security glowed from the unlocked door which placed me only a few feet from the placid sidewalk outside.
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