Were it not
for these slight symptoms of potations, he was such a one as you would
pick out of a thousand for a miser. A year or two ago he suddenly
disappeared.
A great many years ago, when the old house was still new, a young man
with no baggage save a small hair-trunk, came and took the room I have
mentioned and another adjoining. He supposed he might stay fifty
days--and he staid fifty years and over. This was a very fashionable
neighborhood, and he kept the rooms on that account month after month.
But when he had been here about a year something happened to him, so it
was rumored, that greatly changed the tenor of his life; and from that
time on there began to appear in him and to accumulate upon each other
in a manner which became the profound study of Kookoo, the symptoms of a
decay, whose cause baffled the landlord's limited powers of conjecture
for well-nigh half a century. Hints of a duel, of a reason warped, of
disinheritance, and many other unauthorized rumors, fluttered up and
floated off, while he became recluse, and, some say, began incidentally
to betray the unmanly habit which we have already noticed.
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