Turning the corner of the next street, I saw wide-open the door of a
substantial large house, and went in. From bottom to top there was no
one there, except one English girl, sitting back in an easy-chair in the
drawing-room, which was richly furnished with Valenciennes curtains and
azure-satin things. She was a girl of the lowest class, hardly clad in
black rags, and there she lay with hanging jaw, in a very crooked and
awkward pose, a jemmy at her feet, in her left hand a roll of
bank-notes, and in her lap three watches. In fact, the bodies which I
saw here were, in general, either those of new-come foreigners, or else
of the very poor, the very old, or the very young.
But what made me remember this house was that I found here on one of the
sofas a newspaper: _The Kent Express_; and sitting unconscious of my
dead neighbour, I pored a long while over what was written there.
It said in a passage which I tore out and kept:
'Telegraphic communication with Tilsit, Insterburg, Warsaw, Cracow,
Przemysl, Gross Wardein, Karlsburg, and many smaller towns lying
immediately eastward of the 21st parallel of longitude has ceased during
the night.
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