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Under the hot breathless shade of the trees on its shore arose that acrid all-pervading smell that seems to hang everywhere about the tropics, a smell as of some monstrous musty still-room where herbs and spices have been crushed and distilled and stored for hundreds of years, and where the windows have seldom been opened.
Jawleyford threw aside her silk apron, and took a hasty glance of her face in the old eagle-topped mirror in the still-room; the young ladies discarded their coarse dirty pocket-handkerchiefs, and gently drew elaborately fringed ones through their taper fingers to give them an air of use, as they took a hasty review of themselves in the swing mirrors; the housemaid hurried off with a whole armful of brown holland; and Jawleyford threw himself into attitude in an elaborately carved, richly cushioned, easy-chair, with a Disraeli's Life of Lord George Bentinck in his hand.
The Vicar was quite accustomed to these sudden calls, and he submitted to them with a little groan. He did not know who the young woman might be, and he did not care; it might be Mistress Cambridge, it might be Mistress Clarissa herself, it might be the still-room maid, or the barmaid at the "Rod and Fly;" it was all one to him.
These and other small frailties were forgotten as the new Sir Thomas and his spouse took possession and proceeded in a few weeks to turn the place inside out, dismissing five of the stable-boys, cutting down the garden staff by one-third, and carrying havoc into the housekeeper's apartments, the dairy, the still-room.
He could hear the chirp of the crickets faintly from the distant kitchen, and the tick of the clock sounded loud and hollow along the passage. In the old still-room, as he opened the door, was no light, except what was admitted from the candle he carried.
It was one of those dreams in which the continuity of the waking state that immediately preceded it seems unbroken; for he thought that he was sitting in the chair which he occupied, and in the room where he actually was. It seemed to him that he got up, took a candle in his hand, and went through the passages to the old still-room where Philip Feltram lay. The house seemed perfectly still.
"We have done our best done everything. I don't think the doctor, when he comes, will say that anything has been omitted; but all won't do. Does any one here know how it happened?" Two men knew very well the man who had been ducked, and his companion, a younger man, who was also in the still-room, and had lent a hand in carrying Feltram up to the house.
The still-room was dark and unopened, for the servants had not thought it necessary to include it in their preparations. Grace went to the window and undid the fastenings, and the yellow afternoon sun streamed on the dusty wooden bench where Geordie, and Jean, and Elsie used to sit.
We even begin to wonder whether other species may not be inclined to derive a direct advantage from the hunting imposed upon them for the maintenance of the family. The Odynerus' method of work, the splitting open of the anal still-room, is too far removed from the obvious procedure to have many imitators; it is a secondary detail and impracticable with a different kind of game.
Jean manifested undisguised satisfaction when the dim still-room precincts were fairly left behind, and they got into the pleasant old walled-in garden, where the yellow afternoon's sun was lying on the opening fruit-blossom, and bringing delicious scents out of the newly-blown lilac and hawthorn.
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