For my own part, I intend to believe nothing henceforward that has anything of the 'singular' about it." These fellows, knowing the extravagant gullibility of the age, set their wits to work in the imagination of improbable possibilities - of odd accidents, as they term them but to a reflecting intellect (like mine," I added, in parenthesis, putting my forefinger unconsciously to the side of my nose,) "to a contemplative understanding such as I myself possess, it seems evident at once that the marvelous increase of late in these 'odd accidents' is by far the oddest accident of all. "This thing," I exclaimed, "is a contemptible falsehood - a poor hoax - the lees of the invention of some pitiable penny-a-liner - of some wretched concoctor of accidents in Cocaigne. Upon seeing this I fell into a great rage, without exactly knowing why. It entered the lungs, and in a few days killed him." He placed the needle at the wrong end of the tube, and drawing his breath strongly to puff the dart forward with force, drew the needle into his throat. He was playing at 'puff the dart,' which is played with a long needle inserted in some worsted, and blown at a target through a tin tube. A London paper mentions the decease of a person from a singular cause. "The avenues to death are numerous and strange. When I felt my attention somewhat aroused by the paragraph which follows : Having carefully perused the column of "houses to let," and the column of "dogs lost," and then the two columns of "wives and apprentices runaway," I attacked with great resolution the editorial matter, and, reading it from beginning to end without understanding a syllable, conceived the possibility of its being Chinese, and so re-read it from the end to the beginning, but with no more satisfactory result. I made effort to arouse myself by aid of frequent Lafitte, and, all failing, I betook myself to a stray newspaper in despair. In the morning I had been reading Glover's "Leonidas," Wilkie's "Epigoniad," Lamartine's "Pilgrimage," Barlow's "Columbiad," Tuckermann's "Sicily," and Griswold's "Curiosities" I am willing to confess, therefore, that I now felt a little stupid. I had just consummated an unusually hearty dinner, of which the dyspeptic truffe formed not the least important item, and was sitting alone in the dining-room, with my feet upon the fender, and at my elbow a small table which I had rolled up to the fire, and upon which were some apologies for dessert, with some miscellaneous bottles of wine, spirit and liqueur.
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