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I need not catalogue the thousand other situations in life infinitely more "sleep-compelling" than Morphine; for myself, my pleasantest and soundest moments of perfect forgetfulness of this dreary world and all its cares, have been taken in an oaken bench, seated bolt upright and vis a vis to a lecturer on botany, whose calming accents, united with the softened light of an autumnal day, piercing its difficult rays through the narrow and cobwebbed windows, the odour of the recent plants and flowers aiding and abetting, all combined to steep the soul in sleep, and you sank by imperceptible and gradual steps into that state of easy slumber, in which "come no dreams," and the last sounds of the lecturer's "hypogenous and perigenous" died away, becoming beautifully less, till your senses sank into rest, the syllables "rigging us, rigging us," seemed to melt away in the distance and fade from your memory Peace be with you, Doctor A. If I owe gratitude any where I have my debt with you.

What shall I do? what can I do?" continued he, as he held the cobwebbed bottle in one hand and stroked his chin with the other. "But no matter: there's no time for reflection: the die is cast, and may God help me in my need!" He ascended the stair, entered the dining-room with the corkscrew in the last cork, and found that during his absence Lenora had ordered fresh glasses on the table.

Those fruits that ripen in summer do not last. They are sweet; they are glowing with gold; but they melt with a luscious sweetness upon the lip. They do not give that strength and nutriment which will bear a man bravely through the coming chills of winter. The last scene of summer changes now to the cobwebbed ceiling of an attorney's office.

Looking up, he saw a couple of villainous faces, which he did not recognise as belonging to the gang he had been walking with for two days. It was morning, as he could perceive by the light that was strained through a cobwebbed grating over his head. The two men demanded if he wished to be tossed in a blanket. Tristram, not understanding, shook his head.

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 was a busy exchange of presents after dinner, and next day he accompanied his parents to church, as he had done for five and twenty years, finding peace and a welcome in the worm-eaten pew, the cobwebbed window, the top-heavy decorations and the familiar musty books.

Population, twenty-seven thousand soldiers and three thousand non- combatants; the city utterly cut off from the world walled solidly in, the frontage by gunboats, the rear by soldiers and batteries; hence, no buying and selling with the outside; no passing to and fro; no God- speeding a parting guest, no welcoming a coming one; no printed acres of world-wide news to be read at breakfast, mornings a tedious dull absence of such matter, instead; hence, also, no running to see steamboats smoking into view in the distance up or down, and plowing toward the town for none came, the river lay vacant and undisturbed; no rush and turmoil around the railway station, no struggling over bewildered swarms of passengers by noisy mobs of hackmen all quiet there; flour two hundred dollars a barrel, sugar thirty, corn ten dollars a bushel, bacon five dollars a pound, rum a hundred dollars a gallon; other things in proportion: consequently, no roar and racket of drays and carriages tearing along the streets; nothing for them to do, among that handful of non-combatants of exhausted means; at three o'clock in the morning, silence; silence so dead that the measured tramp of a sentinel can be heard a seemingly impossible distance; out of hearing of this lonely sound, perhaps the stillness is absolute: all in a moment come ground-shaking thunder-crashes of artillery, the sky is cobwebbed with the crisscrossing red lines streaming from soaring bomb- shells, and a rain of iron fragments descends upon the city; descends upon the empty streets: streets which are not empty a moment later, but mottled with dim figures of frantic women and children scurrying from home and bed toward the cave dungeons encouraged by the humorous grim soldiery, who shout 'Rats, to your holes! and laugh.

It did not seem too strange to them that I should fly in through the window, for who should be a hot-headed suitor if it is not a gallant Hussar? And if the door be locked, then what way is there but the window? Once more we assembled all four in the parlour, while the cobwebbed bottle was brought up and the ancient glories of the House of Ravon were unrolled before me.

With some of the fallen wood lying about, a man could make a fire, and pass a winter night in very tolerable comfort. He made his way in, managed to prop a sack against the small cobwebbed window, fastened the door with a rusty bolt, and brought out an electric torch he always carried in his pocket. There was not a house within a long distance.

"She hadn't been there again up to the time of my leaving," the banker replied, "but, I came away before closing." The telegraph office in the railway station was a dingy place of cobwebbed murk.