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Braddon, M. E. (Mary Elizabeth), 1835-1915

"Phantom Fortune, a Novel"


Within about a quarter of a mile of Lady Maulevrier's shrubberies Mr.
Hammond encountered a pedestrian, who, like himself, was evidently
taking a constitutional ramble in the morning air, but on a much less
extended scale, for this person did not look capable of going far
afield.
He was an old man, something under middle height, but looking as if he
had once been taller; for his shoulders were much bent, and his head was
sunk on his chest. His whole form looked wasted and shrunken, and John
Hammond thought he had never seen so old a man--or at any rate any man
who was so deeply marked with all the signs of extreme age; and yet in
the backwoods of America he had met ancient settlers who remembered
Franklin, and who had been boys when the battle of Bunker's Hill was
fresh in the memory of their fathers and mothers.
The little old man was clad in a thick grey overcoat of some shaggy kind
of cloth which looked like homespun. He wore a felt hat, and carried a
thick oak stick, and there was nothing in his appearance to indicate
that he belonged to any higher grade than that of the shepherds and
guides with whom Hammond had made himself familiar during his previous
visit.


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