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wide, nor so imposing, nor straight at all. I am come. The physical and metap grossly understating the truth. The pavement prob- the earth must not again be heaped lem has not been solved. The underground rail- together. It would not do to have way is a nightmare. The telegraph-wires, instead of ment of London untried: it has showed being carried safely underneath the sidewalks, form humanity can be and cannot be. The e a network overhead, and break down and cut peo- are huge, but unprecise; ordinary individu ple's throats. Wherever we look, nothing is as it its wind knocked out of it. If you join in w should be, or even as it might be. The Albert throng, you exchange yourself for it; if you sta Memorial is an outrage. The mighty river Thames, yourself and refuse to be drawn in, the effort instead of being the Amazon, is a rivulet. Or turn, holding back distorts you into eccentricity: in sho if you will, to the famous London press, and hear, you cannot keep your proper countenance in the not what I say, but what it says about itself. The neighborhood of such an overbearing loadstone; Times is timeserving, snobbish, fallible. The Sat- and if you are not possessed of an exceptionally urday Review is stale, labored, insincere. The sturdy set of features, defiant of any power that can Athenæum has become an asylum for decayed old be brought to bear upon them, you had better get ladies. The Spectator gushes. The grim Examiner out of the way altogether. It is true that great men starves in the effort to achieve impossibilities. Punch and geniuses seem to thrive on the rich diet and is dull and timid. The later-born newspapers are strong wine that upset their lesser brethren; but so confused echoes of their elders, with an addition of few people come under their category that the genflippancy and vulgarity gratis. Really, it is high eral conclusion is not invalidated. time these complacent Englishmen should understand that they and their belongings are anything but perfec

III.

IV.

But it is a fine illustration of great men-that delight they have in plunging into the densest turmoil of their fellow-creatures, and growing greater, Antæus-like, by the contact. And, conversely, you may find your surest way to the capital of the world by BUT your Englishman, if he stops to hear you hunting up the bearers of mighty names. They carry out at all, replies with a grin of contempt, not at London-that is, the intensest, broadest, most varied himself, but at you. He knows all these things that life-in their hearts; and they naturally seek the you tell him, and more; and they weigh not a feath- physical environment which best corresponds with er in the balance. There stands London, enormous, their spiritual furniture. Perhaps, therefore, we unequaled, renowned, and caring rather less for your should let London continue for the behoof of the criticisms than for one of her own fogs. She is a best men. Instead of the greatest good of the greatsovereign who can afford to wear indifferent gar- est number, we ought to consider the gratification of ments, and otherwise do what she pleases. She the few foremost. Yet our concern for them is fussy keeps house for a formidable fraction of the human and officious. That they can thrive in the imperial race, and all the giants of modern history have lived city is proof that they can do without her. They are in her or visited her, and confessed her majesty and free and independent, if anybody is; and if the sense magnetism. Her overgrown bulk does not much of mankind condemns London as a dangerous luxury concern her she accounts that but a subordinate for the race at large, they will lend their aid to overform of greatness: for she is big with the past; turn her. despite her materialism, it is her immaterial part that imports. A bit of pavement on which Shakespeare has trod, a post which Johnson has touched, a tavern in which Moore has sung songs, a chamber in which Raleigh has been confined, a suburb where Bacon lived-there is no pooh-poohing such dignities as these. London's body is great only because her spirit is greater. The thing did not happen dis-ed the contrivance of dividing up the unwieldy muconnectedly and by accident. Familiarity with her does not breed contempt; we learn that her pavingstones are not of gold, but meanwhile we have stumbled upon something richer and better. Her shortcomings seem but to enhance her incorrigible worth. Chicago and St. Louis may by-and-by come to measure miles with her, and compare buildings, and methods of transit, and parks; but the less they say about any other kind of competition the better. The world is twice as large and valuable since London came into it: there has never before been such a city, and perhaps it is well to pray that there may never be such another; for, though this splendor of concentration is so powerful and so fascinating, the opposite policy seems destined to obtain in time to

IN fact, London has already become a sort of white elephant, putting its possessors to their wits' end. The irregularity and amazement of its streets infinitely exaggerate the virtual area of the city, and it was a lucky day for postmen that saw invent

nicipal carcass into fore-quarter, hind-quarter, rib,
and sirloin, clumsy and arbitrary though the division
was. And the chief aim of Londoners is, having
got the biggest town in the world, to make it as
practically small again as possible. I do not refer
merely to their underground railways, their cabs,
'buses, and tramways, their ferry-boats, messengers,
and telegraphs, but to the tendency and reason of
all their ways of living. The London of the dwell-
ers in Cheapside and Lombard Street is a place of
very narrow dimensions; many an American village
is larger. The crowd with and past which they dai-
ly hurry to their business is but part of the ordinary
furniture of the streets-they never think of moral-
izing about it. Their mind holds the idea of their

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cab or 'bus, of their office, of their restaurant, of their club, and that is all, so far as London is concerned. Add the houses at which they dine out once a week or month, and there remains nothing. Mayfair is equally limited within itself. They ride in the Row, they stare out of Pall Mall windows, they show themselves at one another's parties, and at the theatre, the shops in Regent and Bond Streets. Of Pentonville and Whitechapel they know nothing. There are London clique and style, as pronounced and provincial as any of Beacon Street or Pumpkinville. The typical cockney is not a great but a small man. The very pressure of the immensities around him crams him into a certain narrow groove, whence to budge would be explosion. I cannot walk London streets in a turban, or in a long-tailed blue coat with brass buttons, without exciting general remark, and the hostility of the police. This is not what we would expect; a Kaffre naked from the Zambezi should be able to dine at the Athenæum and dawdle in the Park without causing so much as a butcher's boy to turn his head. London, from this point of view, is a petty affair enough; a set of baby features imbedded in broad acres of meaningless flesh. It does not all mean one thing; if you pick it up it will fall in twenty pieces. It is cosmopolitan on the surface, but only so. It is not an immeasurable unit, with St. Paul's for a centre, as it is made out to be in the title-picture of the Illustrated London News. It is a bundle of sticks, not a single giant bole. Were it otherwise, what a Tree Yggdrasil it would be! whose terrible roots would drain all the sap out of the rest of the world in another generation. But, by a wise decree of Providence, giants of body have seldom been giants of soul, and London does not prove the rule by being the exception to it. The Tower of Babel could ascend only so far, and London, spread how much it will, reached long ago the limits of its greatness. Perhaps it was formerly greater than now, both comparatively-because there are other giants abroad in these days; and intrinsically-because the increase of its skirts has diminished its central vitality. Yet, after all subtractions and detractions, there stands London, unrivaled, inconceivable, invincible. It is as an anvil, on which all men may hammer out their reflections without fear of cracking it.

V.

THAT same amazing street - arrangement just alluded to makes London indefinitely more attractive to me, and the attraction is of a kind that wears better than has been the case with far fairer and more classic cities. She is a kind of second nature; the laws of her being are as intricate as those of the world, perhaps more so. Were she laid out in American parallelograms or Parisian boulevards, I should be captivated for a time, but should as soon think of falling definitely in love with her as of marrying a statue instead of a variable woman of flesh and blood. I have been acquainted with London, off and on, for four or five years, but there are ten thousand places in it of which I have not even heard,

though doubtless they have often lain immediately on the right and left of my line of march. Every district, every block of houses, has a distinct set of features and twang of its own, though all, as has been said, are mystically subordinate to the whole. London will be the last country to be fully explored; regions will remain unknown there long after South Africa has become an island, and the north-pole been covered ten feet high with the names of tourists. A family might take up their abode there, and each member of it, for generation after generation, take a new walk every day, and at the end of a hundred years discover that their knowledge of the place was really very limited.

I always respect an actor who has in him greatness enough to deliver his best passages with an unpremeditated air-not as if they had already become part of the language. So in London, I like to happen upon spots, tucked away amid the most unpromising surroundings, which are yet so famous in the world's history that it seems a marvel they were not framed in gold and hung up conspicuously in the City-Hall. What wealth, we say, must that be which can afford to keep such a jewel as this in the background! If ever I set up a museum of curiosities, one of the first things I shall secure for it will be a London city 'bus, incrusted over with all these invaluable names. How composedly that driver whips up his horses; and mark the nonchalant manner in which the conductor shouts out those immortal words! They would be great men indeed were they anything but pitiably ignorant of their advantages.

I am still in doubt, however, whether this curiosity about historic spots be not morbid rather than legitimate. Is it not somewhat akin to the lackadaisical sentiment which prompts us to weep over the tombs of our friends? Our friends are not in the tomb, neither are the mighty men of yore in these old haunts of theirs; therefore, what are we after there? I suspect the truth to be, that we love such places because we feel in a large sense at home in them. The best part of us lives in great men, whether past or present; and when we stand where they have stood, or look at things with which they were familiar, we feel our roots in the world strengthen and our sympathy with the human race somehow enlarged. Those unfortunate people whose lot it has been to travel much, and more or less to lose the power of connecting the idea of home with the scenes of childhood, have reason to be thankful for Shakespeare's cottage at Stratford, for Goethe's house at Weimar, for Martin Luther's ink-stained chamber, and for many a spot in the neighborhood of Temple Bar. Here is your home, poor traveler; here you were builded better than you knew; here were brooded the thoughts and seen the visions of the immortal youth of your genius. For are they not your visions and your thoughts, since mankind are one, and the worthiest of us but the fullest and keenest perception and utterance of the lesser ?

In thus venturing to force my Pegasus to transcend for a moment his customary safe and respectable jog-trot, I am only bringing him the more

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speedily toward a certain cozy and ancient chophouse, where I can invite the reader to some solid English refreshment, and where, perhaps, we may conclude our introductory moralizings upon the absolute London quite as comfortably as elsewhere. For it is probably needless to observe that any attempt to describe in detail, or even to summarize what are called the chief points of interest in London, is farthest both from my purpose and my desire. The reader, if he be also a traveler, has seen them all for himself; or, if he be but a reader pure and simple, then he is weary of perusing what thousands of more ambitious and conscientious pens than mine have already writ concerning them. I mean to confine myself, both here and hereafter, to the veriest trifles, and to the legitimate vague and general reflections thence derived. It is not within my instructions to give a picture of the London or England of to-day, whether in its physical, historical, literary, or social aspect. As for London, I shall take leave of it very shortly, and not visit it again, save for the briefest glimpses. Once out of the city, I shall cast my lines in a somewhat out-of-the-way spot, and direct my attention mainly to my immediate surroundings, many of which, perhaps, would prove more or less of a novelty even to some Englishmen―at least, from my point of view. Let those who are dissatisfied with this outlook go to M. Taine, or where they will. They can meet with nothing to detain them here, unless it be the prospect of something to be dissatisfied about.

VI.

PASSING from St. Paul's down Ludgate Hill, and along ugly, populous Fleet Street, we presently come in sight of Temple Bar, which, having grown weak in the legs from so long bestriding this famous thoroughfare, is now supported amidships by a massive wooden crutch, and further protected by a couple of policemen, who mount guard on each side of it, and enforce the warning to all vehicles to proceed at a snail's pace. Progress, in the shape of the new courts of justice, has partly undermined this timehonored structure; and it has been gravely mooted by the city fathers whether they should pluck it up from its historic site and set it down somewhere else, where it might retain its traditional renown without interfering with the traffic of the street. Alas! a stone is but a stone when it is a corner stone no longer; and who would care for Temple Bar after it has ceased to be the bar of the Temple? As a practical man, I think it ought to come down; as a sentimentalist, I would rather see all London come down first; but the practical sentimentality of taking it down here and putting it up again there is beyond me, and will, I believe, prove too much for the gravity even of the city fathers.

We make these reflections standing before an unobtrusive doorway less than a hundred feet from the triple archway of the Bar. It is narrow and devoid of ornament, and might easily be passed unnoticed. Above it stands a rusty, gilded cock, in the act of crowing; and the name of the tavern is the

Old Cock. It belongs, I should say, to the upper middle class of taverns, or perhaps it ranks still higher; it is difficult to gauge it by our American standards. At all events, the Old Cock pretends to a good wine-cellar, and refuses to permit its patrons a pipe of tobacco after their beer, as is the custom at other outwardly similar establishments. Probably it takes pride in concealing aristocratic qualities beneath a studiedly sober suit of feathers. Not that I am aware of having met any peers of the realm here; the customers seem generally to belong to the prosperous mercantile class. It has not been my fortune, either, to happen upon an eccentric knot of wits and humorists as I have once or twice done at sequestered chop-houses not far from this, where the cutty-pipe was allowed. But I take the Old Cock, such as it is, to be a very fair example of London houses of its class, as well as an agreeable sort of place intrinsically; enter we, therefore, without more ado.

We pause yet a moment, however, to buy a copy of the Echo for a halfpenny from the small, vociferous newsboy, who, if it be about four o'clock in the afternoon, as it ought to be to insure a quiet dinner and elbow-room, is sure to be on stand at the doorpost, with the latest edition of that blushing journal under his arm. Passing down a long, narrow passage-way, and through some folding-doors, we find ourselves in a lengthy but otherwise contracted apartment, probably the result of throwing three or four small square rooms into one. The ceiling is low, the wainscot high, dark, and polished, and the little boxes or incipient rooms which line the sides of the main room like the roe of a fish are of the same deeptinted wood. I took it for granted, on my first introduction here, that the wood was oak, blackened by time, and the immemorial rubbings of shoulders, elbows, and hands. But one day I found to my surprise that it is all fine, solid mahogany. I was not altogether pleased with my discovery; but it is a trait of the English to like the sort of richness which is apparent only at a second or third glance, or at an interior view. They delight so much in ostentation, that they are ostentatious in concealing it. palaces in May Fair are outwardly dingy and featureless to the last degree; built of the ugliest yellow-black bricks, and on the plainest horizontals and perpendiculars. But inside they tell a different story; they are rather sepulchred whitenesses than whited sepulchres. No doubt the latter form of deception is more unpleasant than the former; but perhaps truth and consistency throughout might be better than either.

The

The floor of the Old Cock is sanded or sawdusted. This arrangement inspires a delightfully homelike feeling; it is at once so cleanly and so primitive, inviting you to take your ease, and yet far removed from savagery.

Nothing can surpass sawdusted floors for comfort and wholesome simplicity. The human race would be improved by living upon them for a generation; they laugh to scorn all effeminate luxury and gaudiness, but never discountenance what is strong, efficient, and useful. They call up

memories of old-fashioned spinning-jennies, highbacked chairs, and antique costumes and customs. Waxed and polished floors of inlaid woods, which are beginning to take the place of carpets, are scarcely less a vanity than they, although certainly prettier and cleaner. As for marble, it belongs to paganism, and quite another form of civilization than ours.

the other hand the port is not bad, and I am in the habit of calling for a sentimental pint thereof occasionally. It forms a pleasant bond of union between the chop or steak and the Stilton cheese. All these things are brought from out a darksome doorway at the end of the apartment, beyond which I presume the kitchen lies, though I never explored it. In some restaurants the kitchen is partitioned off from the dining-room by glass, or even occupies the lower end of it without any partition; a huge fire of glowing coals fills the broad grate, and the fat cook broils our dinner before our eyes on a silver gridiron. Such a plan is probably agreeable to most people of healthy stomachs, who thus doubly enjoy the feast; but squeamish eaters must be cautious. The cook, of course, should be a person of refined tact; not like those skillful but terrible Frenchmen, who take nameless liberties with saucepans, in order to see whether they are hot enough. Perhaps we ought to eat nothing which we would be afraid to I know not whether this be the same Cock cele- see cooked; but how many a seeming-innocent delibrated by Mr. Will Waterproof, in that lyrical mono-cacy would that rule deduct from our bills-of-fare! logue of his; the head-waiter is not plump; but on [TO BE CONTINUED.]

The head-waiter, who paces forever backward and forward between the rows of boxes, a refined, spare, elderly personage in full dress, assigns us an attendant, who brings us a pewter mug of ale on a small, round, china-bottomed holder, having a picture of the Old Cock imprinted upon it: and then goes off to order our chop or steak. What chops these are! I once made the mistake of ordering two, on the strength of an exceptional appetite; after finishing the first I looked at the second; it was the better of the two; but, so far as I am concerned, it remains untasted to this day.

A

AVICE GRAY:

A STORY IN THIRTEEN CHAPTERS.

CHAPTER I.

A CUP OF COLD WATER.

MONG the many duties recognized by the ancients I am not aware that there was one of the name, or possessed of the attributes, of what we call Chance. Destiny they acknowledged; but Destiny was altogether a different thing. Destiny watched over the lives of men, supplied their motives, directed their actions, and either perfected or frustrated their designs. Destiny allowed nothing hap-hazard, but either for good or for evil, and, under the agency of her handmaidens the Fates, influenced all that came to pass.

But we in these days are so far in advance of the ancients that we refuse to place trust in the influence of Destiny any longer. We have no longer the confidence or the credulity to believe that our affairs are under other guidance than our own. Whether we have improved on the old faith is another matter, since when as is often the case-we are compelled to admit that we cannot always manage our concerns for the best, those who have not sufficient piety to allow the direction of one overruling Power deify Chance. Coincidences we still confess to some belief in; presentiment we do not altogether deny the existence of; and, whatever we cannot conveniently account for under either of these two heads, we attribute to Chance; but a childlike faith we leave to children, and to those past times when we, in our present wisdom, deem the world also to have been in its childhood.

So much by way of preface. Now to begin. On the 14th of July, in a year which it is not necessary particularly to specify, two persons met in a narrow wood-path, face to face. Up to that moment utter strangers to each other-parting as little known as they had met-either little guessed the influence that single point of contact would have upon

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the lives of both. Little could they suppose how the few words spoken, the careless look and smile, nay, even the commonplace outward surroundings, would be by after-events so burned in upon their minds as never in years to come to be forgotten. It was, as we in our blindness should phrase it, a meeting of the purest chance; but on that chance meeting hung afterward the life of one and the life's happiness of the other.

It was, as has been said, July, and one of the hottest and most fervid days of that hot and fervid month. The earth lay parching and panting under the caresses of her fierce lover the sun; there was no coolness in the strong south breeze that rustled the leaves and bowed the fields of waving grain; the crisp curl and sparkle of the blue waters of the lake dazzled but did not refresh; there was no tender haze nor softness in the bright noon air in which every object stood out clear, distinct, and plain; the roads stretched pitilessly white and dusty and wearisome before the traveler; the shadows had retreated to the roots of the trees, as though they felt themselves out of place in so glaring a scene, and waited for their turn by-and-by, leaving the sun to have it all his own way for the present. Animal life also felt the influence of the atmosphere. The hum of the grasshopper and the ceaseless chirp of the cricket filled the air, but the birds were almost silent; listless cattle had ceased to feed, and tried to find forgetfulness of heat and insects in sleep; only man, whose toil is never-ending, pursued his labor as he best could under the burning sun, fulfilling literally the doom pronounced on Adam.

In the wood-path of which I have spoken, it was something better, though even here the sun's vertical rays left sacred but few spots. But the path was grassy, and the heavy summer foliage hung ripe on either hand, and curves and sharp angles in the road cast some shadows here and there. It was only a foot-track through coppices of underbrush and dense

young growth of bushes and tall weeds, and seldom used except, as now by the man, as a short-cut from station to station, and, as by the girl, as a road in the fruit-season to those places where grew the spontaneous gifts of the earth.

What could have induced any man to walk on this melting morning across the ridges from Whitechester to Bleekmans, which it afterward appeared was his destination, is a mystery which must ever remain unsolved. True, the short distance is but five miles, while round by the road it is eleven, owing to the intervening marsh only passable on foot, and scarcely even so; but, when we consider how much more prone is human nature to sacrifice time to convenience than comfort to time, we can only fall back on the theory that Chance (unless we change our phraseology and devoutly say the hand of Providence) had directed our traveler on this occasion to the use of his own limbs. He had, however, more than repented of his rash resolve before half the distance was passed; and while waiting for breath, seated on a prostrate tree at one of the shady curves aforesaid, he was startled by the sudden apparition of the girl.

Only by the suddenness of her appearance in that unfrequented place, for in herself there was nothing terrible. A fair, fresh girl of seventeen or eighteen, with bright cheeks, smiling lips and eyes, and rippling auburn hair, is not an alarming object, even to a pursy man of more than middle age, with grizzled locks and lines that tell of hard experience on his weather-beaten face. So, after the first involuntary exclamation, he looked with a pleased expression at the bright young vision that stood before him.

I say stood, for at the sound of his voice she stopped. Fortunately for her, something even more attractive than her beauty arrested his attention as she passed him. Her pretty face might have pleased him for a moment, received a kindly nod, gone by, and been forgotten; but what was of far more importance in his sight was a tin pail hanging on her arm, in the bottom of which some water splashed about with a delicious gurgling sound.

"Hold on!" he said, after giving her "goodday." "Give us a drink if you have it to spare. I'm pretty nigh choked."

"Tis warm, ain't it?" the girl said, handing him the pail and taking off a pink sun-bonnet to fan her pinker face; and he noticed as she did so that she drew carefully back into the shade of the bushes.

"You're careful of your skin, I reckon," he remarked, with a laugh, looking at the delicate bloom which even that day's heat had scarcely marred. "And I don't know but what you're right to be so. How old are you?"

"Eighteen next week."

"I thought about that. I'd a child once of that age, and she didn't look very unlike you either. Got a beau?" he added, somewhat suddenly.

It seemed so absolutely certain that a girl with such a face must possess one, if not more than one, of those appendages, and take them as a matter of course, that he rather wondered at the scarlet flush which overspread her face and neck at his very commonplace joke; and, instead of the laughing answer he expected, she stammered something quite inaudible.

"I didn't mean to offend you," he said. "I'm old enough to be your grandfather, so you needn't mind what I say. Going to be married, perhaps?"

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with a mixture of carelessness and confusion; but the carelessness was very evidently simulated, while the confusion was perceptibly real.

"You're too young," said the man, looking at her attentively. "If you'd take my advice-but you won't take it, so I'll keep it by me for the next one that will. What's the use of talking to girls like you? Haven't I done it before, and didn't I do it in vain?" He grew suddenly grave, drew a deep sigh, and was silent.

""Tain't good," said the girl, as he took the pail again and raised it to his mouth for a second draught. "It's only swale-water, but as it was pretty clear I took some for fear I'd be dry before I got home. It's quite a little piece to walk."

Been berrying?" And he looked at some red stains on her fingers.

"Yes, but berries is few and scattering this year. I started out to look for some, but I got none worth while. Don't you know blood from berry-juice? See here! what a scratch I got as I was climbing a fence."

She turned back her sleeve and showed a deep mark from which the blood still oozed a little; and he now noticed that it had dripped and left broad blotches down the side of her faded light cotton dress. Why, did that small scratch bleed all that?" he asked.

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"And more too, till I washed it off in the swale."

"You haven't walked from Low's swale this morning?"

"I guess no one carried me either there or back. But what do you know about Low's swale? You're a stranger in these parts, ain't you?"

"I wasn't always, if I am now. I used to know the place well enough, and that's why I undertook to walk across, instead of going round, as I ought. But either the road is longer than it was, or else my legs were younger then than they are now." The girl laughed.

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"Well, it's no longer now to go on than to go back," she said. "I wonder what time it is?-it

must be near noon."

As she spoke the sound of a hoarse whistle came on the breeze to their ears.

"That's the eastern express coming into Whitechester; it's a quarter to twelve."

"Well, I must go on," said the traveler, slowly rising. "And when you catch me walking across this confounded ridge again you may tell me of it, that's all. Much obliged for the water." And he went his way.

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Quite welcome," was the stereotyped answer; and the girl took her seat on the log he had just vacated, and watched the retreating figure out of sight. -"I wonder who he is?" she thought. "I wish I'd found out his name. But what matter? I'll never see him again."

As the girl sat there in the bloom of young beauty and the flush of a happiness long strange to her, the recollection of the unknown traveler soon passed from her mind. Dreaming of happy days soon to come, the events of the present moment were little to her; in visions of a youth and beauty like her own she forgot the uninteresting age and ugliness from which she had just parted; and foresaw not that the time was near at hand when all the world's wealth, and almost all earthly hopes, would be freely bartered for the sight of that weather-beaten face and grizzled hair.

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