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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: for ages afterwards, like the toadstools that indicate where the
fallen and buried trunk of a tree has long since mouldered into
the earth. For our own part, we allow them just as little
credence as to that other fable of the skeleton hand which the
lieutenant- governor was said to have seen at the Colonel's throat,
but which vanished away, as he advanced farther into the room.
Certain it is, however, that there was a great consultation and
dispute of doctors over the dead body. One,--John Swinnerton
by name,--who appears to have been a man of eminence, upheld it,
if we have rightly understood his terms of art, to be a case of
apoplexy. His professional brethren, each for himself, adopted
House of Seven Gables |
