Not long after this came the trunks
marked R. V. which he had sent before him, forerunners of his advent: he
was not going to wait for a reply or an invitation.
What a sound that is,--the banging down of the preliminary trunk, without
its claimant to give it the life which is borrowed by all personal
appendages, so long as the owner's hand or eye is on them! If it announce
the coming of one loved and longed for, how we delight to look at it, to
sit down on it, to caress it in our fancies, as a lone exile walking out
on a windy pier yearns towards the merchantman lying alongside, with the
colors of his own native land at her peak, and the name of the port he
sailed from long ago upon her stern! But if it tell the near approach of
the undesired, inevitable guest, what sound short of the muffled noises
made by the undertakers as they turn the corners in the dim-lighted
house, with low shuffle of feet and whispered cautions, carries such a
sense of knocking-kneed collapse with it as the thumping down in the
front entry of the heavy portmanteau, rammed with the changes of
uncounted coming weeks?
Whether the R.
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