Many an invalid has gone through that martyrdom and sure process of extinction.
CHAPTER III
Drumgool was a bachelor's, or, rather, a widower's, household. The dining-room, where dead-and-gone Frenches looked at one another from dusty canvases, was rarely used; the drawing-room never. Guns and fishing-rods found their way into the sitting-room, which had once been the library, and still held books enough to lend a perfume of mildew and leather to the place—a perfume that mixed not unpleasantly with the smell of cigar-smoke and the scent of the sea.
The house hummed with the sound of the sea. Fling a window open, and the roar of it came in, and the smell of it better than the smell of roses.
Room after room of Drumgool, had you knocked at the doors of them, would have answered you only with echoes.
"Here there was laughter of old;
There was weeping——"
Laughter there was none now, nor weeping—just silence, dust; old furniture, so used by the sea air that a broker's man would scarcely have taken the trouble to take possession of it.