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Reprinted Pieces by Charles Dickens
page 120 of 310 (38%)
Madame Roland and I took leave of one another before mid-night, and
I went to bed full of vast intentions for next day, in connexion
with the unparalleled chapter. To hear the foreign mail-steamers
coming in at dawn of day, and to know that I was not aboard or
obliged to get up, was very comfortable; so, I rose for the chapter
in great force.

I had advanced so far as to sit down at my window again on my
second morning, and to write the first half-line of the chapter and
strike it out, not liking it, when my conscience reproached me with
not having surveyed the watering-place out of the season, after
all, yesterday, but with having gone straight out of it at the rate
of four miles and a half an hour. Obviously the best amends that I
could make for this remissness was to go and look at it without
another moment's delay. So - altogether as a matter of duty - I
gave up the magnificent chapter for another day, and sauntered out
with my hands in my pockets.

All the houses and lodgings ever let to visitors, were to let that
morning. It seemed to have snowed bills with To Let upon them.
This put me upon thinking what the owners of all those apartments
did, out of the season; how they employed their time, and occupied
their minds. They could not be always going to the Methodist
chapels, of which I passed one every other minute. They must have
some other recreation. Whether they pretended to take one
another's lodgings, and opened one another's tea-caddies in fun?
Whether they cut slices off their own beef and mutton, and made
believe that it belonged to somebody else? Whether they played
little dramas of life, as children do, and said, 'I ought to come
and look at your apartments, and you ought to ask two guineas a-
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