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in a flower-garden, and over his shoulder was gazing a shabby, jaunty, decayed-looking person, who was strangely foreign to my eyes, yet irresistibly familiar.
"Don't you remember Mr. Lenox?" asked Harry, staring at me. "Have you forgotten the pleasures of your boyhood, miserable ingrate? Have you no recollection of the big kite this benefactor of your youth made you, which dragged you down the hill and threw you into the ditch?"
"I remember all about it," said I; and indeed I had been shaking hands with my old friend all the time Harry was speaking.--"And I am delighted to see you, Mr. Lenox."
I began looking about me for a chair. In fact, finding a chair was the one trouble of our three lives, and was the only way in which we felt hospitality to be a tax upon our time. For, although we had as many chairs as the room would accommodate, they were always full of books, fruit, cigars or hats and coats. There was one arm-chair, originally covered with horsehair, which Harry called the "funeral coach:" it might have been called anything, for it was so dingy, so battered, so broken, that its raison d'être had come to be a matter of speculation. Into this seat I now inducted our visitor. He was as shabby as the funeral coach itself, but had kept up more gentility in his decay. I had not seen him for four years, and the lack of any change in his appearance surprised me. There he was, as well shaven, as threadbare, as jaunty and well-mannered, as in the old days when we used to play the siege of Troy, using an old packing-case for the wooden horse, and he was our Trojan victim. I was much impressed by my own age, and said a good deal in those days about the flight of time and the mutability of human affairs: I expected anybody who was grown up when I was young to be well stricken in years; and if Mr. Lenox had been a shrunken old man with altered aspect and a deep sense of the worthlessness of all efforts after temporalities, the change would have seemed only a reasonable one to me. < previous next >