atmosphere were those of a receiving-vault.


[Footnote 1: Shades of QUINTILIAN and Dr. JOHNSON, what a
sentence!]

[Footnote 2: Quite
independently of any specific design to that end by the Adapter, this
Adaptation, carefully following the original English narrative as it
does, can not avoid acting as a kind of practical--and, of course,
somewhat exaggerative--commentary upon what is strained, forced, or out
of the line of average probabilities, in the work Adapted.]


CHAPTER XXII.

A CONFUSED STATE OF THINGS.

The principal office of the Comic Paper was one of those amazingly
unsympathetic rooms in which the walls, windows and doors all have a
stiff, unsalient aspect of the most hard-finished indifference to every
emotion of humanity, and a perfectly rigid insensibility to the
pleasures or pains of the tenants within their impassive shelter. In the
whole configuration of the heartless, uncharacterized place there was
not one gracious inequality to lean against; not a ledge to rest elbow
upon; not a panel, not even a stove-pipe hole, to become dearly familiar
to the wistful eye; not so much as a genial crack in the plastering, or
a companionable rattle in a casement, or a little human obstinacy in a
door to base some kind of an acquaintance upon and make one less lonely.
Through the grim, untwinkling windows, gaping sullenly the wrong way