FORE:Alice could do better than give him little bits, thanks to her excellent memory and her practice this afternoon, and in addition to several Songs Without Words, gave him a couple of pretty solid slow movements out of Beethoven��s Sonatas. It was not altogether her fault that she went on so long, for once when she attempted to get up, he said quite aloud so that everybody could hear, ��You naughty girl, sit down and play that other piece at once.�� But when eventually the concert came to a close, he pressed her hand for quite a considerable time behind the shelter of the piano, and said almost in a whisper, ��Oh, such rest, such refreshment!�� Then instantly he became not so much the brisk man of the world as the brisk{61} boy of the world again, and playfully insisted on performing that remarkable duet called ��Chopsticks�� with her, and made her promise that if Mr Keeling lost all his money, and she had to work for her living, she would give him lessons on the piano at seven-and-sixpence an hour. There was a little chaffering over this, for as a poor priest he said that he ought not to give more than five shillings an hour, while Mrs Keeling, joining in the pleasantries, urged Alice to charge ten. The only possible term to the argument seemed to be to split the difference and call it seven-and-sixpence, cash prepaid.... Mr Keeling was appealed to and thought that fair. But he thought it remarkably foolish also.

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FORE:She looked down a moment.

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FORE:"Then we went to see the great bell, which is one of the wonders of the world, though it is not so large as the bell at Moscow. It is said to[Pg 367] weigh 112,000 pounds, but how they ever weighed it I don't know. It is a foot thick at the rim, about twenty feet high, and fifteen feet in diameter; it was cast more than two hundred years ago, and is covered all over, inside and outside, with Chinese characters. There is a little hole in the top of it where people try to throw copper cash. If they succeed, it is a sign that they will be fortunate in life; and if they fail, they must leave the money as an offering to the temple. All of us tried till we had thrown away a double-handful of cash, but we didn't get a single one of them through the hole. So if we fail now in anything, you will know the reason.

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FORE:"Yet what?" I snapped out, with horse eyes.

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FORE:He had made an excursion into fairy land��that was how he framed the matter to himself. There had been The Cedars and work for him before, there would be work and The Cedars for him afterwards. Those who have drunk of the metheglin never perhaps afterwards are wholly free from the reminiscence of the sweet draught brewed magically from the heather and the honey, but they go back after their sojourn among the little people, and behave like ordinary mortals again, and eat the home-brewed bread, and move about their appointed ways. But the nights and days they have spent in the secret places of the earth will, till they die, be more vivid to them than all the actual experiences that they go through afterwards and went through before they penetrated the enchanted glen; the remembrance will colour their idle moments with the ensanguined hue of dream; that baseless fabric, that vision of hidden doors thrown open and the things that lurk within, is more rich, just because to them it is more real than the sober tonelessness of their profession or{328} pursuit. Therefore if they are wise, the best thing they can do is, like Prospero, to drown the magic book beneath the waters of absorbing employment. Often it will float up again to the surface, and each time it must be prodded back with averted eyes. So, for Keeling, a love that could not be realised once crowned the hill-tops of his nature; now that citadel and the very hill-tops themselves had been shaken down and strewn over the plains. He had now one paramount need��that of forgetting, and, since he could not forget, the need resolved itself into the effort to remember as little as possible, to use up in other ways the energy which was his, and the leisure that he could command if he chose.They were off again early in the morning, and in a little while came to the banks of a river which they were to cross. Frank looked for a bridge, and saw none; then he looked for a ferry-boat, but none was visible.

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FORE:A SMALL FOOT WITH A SHOE ON IT. A SMALL FOOT WITH A SHOE ON IT.

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