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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: illusory in this transplantation of the wealth and honours of a
family, a thing by its nature so deeply rooted in the soil;
something ghostly in this sense of home-coming so far from home.
From Dunstable I rolled away into a crescendo of similar
impressions. There are certainly few things to be compared with
these castles, or rather country seats, of the English nobility and
gentry; nor anything at all to equal the servility of the
population that dwells in their neighbourhood. Though I was but
driving in a hired chaise, word of my destination seemed to have
gone abroad, and the women curtseyed and the men louted to me by
the wayside. As I came near, I began to appreciate the roots of
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