Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
page 83 of 98 (84%)
page 83 of 98 (84%)
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A long-sighted man could have discerned that he was a dark fellow, lean;
and from continually looking down on the earth from the elevation over which, in another sense, he always hung, his nose, his lips, his chin were pendulous and loose, and drawn down into a monstrous grotesque. This fellow took his pipe from his mouth on seeing the coach, stood up, and cut some solemn capers high on his beam, and shook a new rope in the air, crying with a voice high and distant as the caw of a raven hovering over a gibbet, "A robe for Judge Harbottle!" The coach was now driving on at its old swift pace. So high a gallows as that, the Judge had never, even in his most hilarious moments, dreamed of. He thought, he must be raving. And the dead footman! He shook his ears and strained his eyelids; but if he was dreaming, he was unable to awake himself. There was no good in threatening these scoundrels. A _brutum fulmen_ might bring a real one on his head. Any submission to get out of their hands; and then heaven and earth he would move to unearth and hunt them down. Suddenly they drove round a corner of a vast white building, and under a _porte-cochère_. CHAPTER VII |
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