My paragraphs,
spite of Nate's verbum saps., lost their originality. I resigned my
post on the _Times_. I became the collector on commission of certain
rents of Uncle Nathan's. Whoso collects rents in Chicago tenements
should know how to box or else to run: I could do neither. I got little
or nothing out of the devils and devillets, my respected uncle's
tenants. He had a genius for the despatch of business: I had none;
therefore he concluded I was an ass, and wondered how he came to be
pleased with me. Oh, 'tis a good thing to know what you can do, and to
do that, and know what you cannot do, and leave that alone. Dull as
weeds of Lethe was my task. 'Twas terrible! I thought it would never
end. No greater misery could be imagined than what I endured in
Nathan's service.
One morning of those days I picked up a note in Lydia's writing hastily
scrawled as follows: "I have discovered your retreat: I must see you.
At seven o'clock wave the lamp three times across the window if all is
well."
In my undecided way I pinned the note to the blue silk pincushion on
Lydia's dressing-case. I had a sudden jealous suspicion of an
acquaintance of ours, a furiously-striking English
traveller--"Bone-Boiler to the Queen" or something--who had a long,
silky, sweeping moustache blowing about in the wind, and parted his
hair "sissy.
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