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At length, as the dawning light came widening up the east, I turned my steps homewards, and before the sun had risen above the farthest pine-ridge, I was sleeping the sweetest sleep that had been mine for years. The conjuror's grave was green with grass and purple with wild thyme when Hortense knelt beside it, and there consummated the weary pilgrimage of half a life.
Look you: I have had experience in these matters; and, I think, the moment a woman is wedded some terrible revolution happens in her system; all her former good qualities vanish, /hey presto/! like eggs out of a conjuror's box; 'tis true they appear on t' other side of the box, the side turned to other people, but for the poor husband they are gone forever. Ods fish, Morton, go to!
I seem to myself to be a mere conjuror's apparatus, an instrument of vision and perception, a person without personality, a subject without any determined individuality an instance, to speak technically, of pure "determinability" and "formability," and therefore I can only resign myself with difficulty to play the purely arbitrary part of a private citizen, inscribed upon the roll of a particular town or a particular country.
We who had all started, from the same little Wisconsin Valley were here drawn together, as if by the magic of a conjuror's wand, in a city strange to us all. Can any other country on earth surpass the United States in the ruthless broadcast dispersion of its families? Could any other land furnish a more incredible momentary re-assembling of scattered units?
"Marry, what should be this? Read me this riddle! To it and unyoke!" A dozen vacant guesses were made as the showman held it aloft. Then with a conjuror's gesture he suddenly placed his thumbs within the rim, released the spring and extended the hat. The assembly laughed again silently as before. "'Tis a hat," said the Cicerone, with a superior air. "Nay," said Maudlin, "give it here."
Wrapped in a rich dressing-gown, a fanciful present from an admiring Marchesa, curiously embroidered with algebraic figures like a conjuror's robe, and with a skull-cap of black satin on his hive of a head, the man of gravity was seated at a huge claw-footed old table, round as the zodiac.
She brings a chicken out of the egg, which we place under the hen for twenty-two days, instead of eating it in the shell as we might have done, and we view it as a matter of course. Yet we do not say here that the bird may not have come down the conjuror's sleeve, or the hen may not have brought it from under her wing.
Then this post of Conjuror's House feasted and danced, undertook gay excursions, discussed in public or private conclave weighty matters, grave and reverend advices, cautions, and commands. They went. Desolation again crept in. The girl dreamed. She was trying to remember. Far-off, half-forgotten visions of brave, courtly men, of gracious, beautiful women, peopled the clouds of her imaginings.
"Ay, marry," replied Wood, with a look that seemed to say that he did not think it required any surprising skill in the art of divination to predict the doom of the individual in question; but whatever opinion he might entertain, he contented himself with inquiring into the grounds of the conjuror's evil augury respecting the infant. "What did the old fellow judge from, eh, Joan?" asked he.
It is true, Crowsfeather and one or two of his companions had taken a look through that medicine-glass, but it rather contributed to increase the conjuror's renown, than served to explain any of the marvels he performed. Peter was most struck with all that had just occurred.
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