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Poor man! he is a very respectable person, and would be a very happy one, if he would add a little employment to his dignity. It would be the salt of life to him. Next to his house, though parted from it by another long garden with a yew arbour at the end, is the pretty dwelling of the shoemaker, a pale, sickly-looking, black-haired man, the very model of sober industry.

Mr Morris, to pass his three hours gently and pleasantly, opened a very old copy, by Blankborough, upon logarithms; Monsieur Brohanne had armed himself with a heavy tome of La Grande Encyclopedie, with a bookmark therein at the page dealing with the ancient langue d'oc; while Mr Rampson, also linguistical, opened a sickly-looking vellum volume, horribly mildewy and stained, and made as if to read a very brown page of Greek whose characters looked like so many tiny creases and shrinkings in a piece of dry skin.

I recognised some euphorbias, with the caustic sugar coming from them; heliotropes, quite incapable of justifying their name, sadly drooped their clusters of flowers, both their colour and perfume half gone. Here and there some chrysanthemums grew timidly at the foot of an aloe with long, sickly-looking leaves.

In the house on the left he saw some open windows; on the window-sills were pots of sickly-looking geraniums. Linen was hung out of the windows... He knew it all by heart. He turned away and sat down on the sofa. Never, never had he felt himself so fearfully alone! Yes, he felt once more that he would perhaps come to hate Sonia, now that he had made her more miserable.

His countenance was pale and rather sickly-looking, his complexion fairer than is usual amongst Spaniards; a large silk cravat was rolled round his neck, and reached nearly to his ears, concealing, it was said, the ravages of disease. His charger was of surpassing beauty; a plumed and glittering staff rode around him; behind came a numerous escort.

Some were swinging on ropes of sennit, suspended from the branches of the trees, and a few were quietly sitting in the shade, making bouquets and wreaths of wild-flowers. Among them all, there was not a single deformed or sickly-looking child. I did not observe any grown persons, most of them probably being at that hour asleep in their houses.

At the door a soldier met me with my passport, and looked as if he expected a fee for handing it to me; but in this he was disappointed. After I had resumed my seat in the coupe, the porter of the custom-house a poor, sickly-looking creature, half dead with the malaria of the place appeared, and demanded a fee for doing nothing to my luggage. He got three pauls, and looked but half contented.

We passed a sickly-looking girl with a sallow face, who dragged her limbs and peered at us dimly with painful eyes. She stood back, as partly blinded people will do, to allow us to pass, although there was plenty of room for us. I glanced back at her. "THAT'S ploombism," said my uncle casually. "What?" said I. "Ploombism. And the other day I saw a fool of a girl, and what d'you think?

A few sickly-looking oranges were all we could obtain to quench our thirst, and we seized those and sat down on the shop door-steps, tired and panting. After a few minutes' rest we started again and walked back to town. Thirteen miles' stretch on a brisk winter day did neither of us any harm, and Dickens was in great spirits over the match that was so soon to come off.

The carriage was standing still all this time, you know. Then sickly-looking men passed, with still more sickly-looking wives, some of them leading a child between them. But even their faces told of wages, and the pleasure of an evenings walk in the park. And now I was able to thank God that they had the parks to walk in.