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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: war party of Indians captured our unlucky merchant, and carried
him to Montreal, there holding him in bondage, till, by the
payment of a heavy ransom, he had wofully subtracted from his
hoard of pine-tree shillings. By his long absence, moreover, his
affairs had become so disordered that, for the rest of his life,
instead of wallowing in silver, he had seldom a sixpence worth of
copper. Doctor Cacaphodel, the alchemist, returned to his
laboratory with a prodigious fragment of granite, which he ground
to powder, dissolved in acids, melted in the crucible, and burned
with the blow-pipe, and published the result of his experiments
in one of the heaviest folios of the day. And, for all these
Twice Told Tales |
