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Doctor Grimshawe's Secret — a Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne
page 83 of 315 (26%)
"what may have drawn on me the good fortune of being compelled to make
my time idle, because yours is so?"

The stranger's cheek flushed a little; but he smiled to himself, as if
saying that here was a grim, rude kind of humorist, who had lost the
sense of his own peculiarity, and had no idea that he was rude at all.
"I came to America, as I told you," said he, "chiefly because I was
idle, and wanted to turn my enforced idleness to what profit I could,
in the way of seeing men, manners, governments, and problems, which I
hope to have no time to study by and by. But I also had an errand
intrusted to me, and of a singular nature; and making inquiry in this
little town (where my mission must be performed, if at all), I have
been directed to you, by your townspeople, as to a person not unlikely
to be able to assist me in it."

"My townspeople, since you choose to call them so," answered the grim
Doctor, "ought to know, by this time, that I am not the sort of man
likely to assist any person, in any way."

"Yet this is so singular an affair," said the stranger, still with mild
courtesy, "that at least it may excite your curiosity. I have come here
to find a grave."

"To find a grave!" said Doctor Grim, giving way to a grim sense of
humor, and relaxing just enough to let out a joke, the tameness of
which was a little redeemed, to his taste, by its grimness. "I might
help you there, to be sure, since it is all in the way of business.
Like others of my profession, I have helped many people to find their
graves, no doubt, and shall be happy to do the same for you. You have
hit upon the one thing in which my services are ready."
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