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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
with iron shutters, came a discouraged light, strained through the
narrow intervals of the dusty roofs above, to discover a large
coffin-colored desk surmounted by ghastly busts of HERVEY, KEBLE and
BLAIR;[3] a smaller desk, over which hung a picture of the Tomb of
WASHINGTON, and at which sat a pallid assistant-editor in deep mourning,
opening the comic contributions received by last mail; a still smaller
desk, for the nominal writer of subscription-wrappers; files of the
_Evangelist_, _Observer_ and _Christian Union_ hanging along the wall; a
dead carpet of churchyard-green on the floor; and a print of Mr.
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