Little Arcady is grievously shaken
Mrs. Potts had written. I had Solon's word for it; but that which followed the writing will not cease within this generation or the next to be an affair of the most baffling mystery to our town folk. Me, also, it amazed; though my emotion was chiefly concerned with those gracious effects which the gods continued to manage from that apparently meaningless sojourn of J. Rodney Potts among us.
Superficially it was a thing of utter fortuity. Actually it was a masterpiece of cunning calculation, a thing which clear-visioned persons might see to bristle with intention on every side.
Years after that innocent encounter between an adventurous negro and an amiable human derelict in the streets of a far city,—those two atoms shaken into contact while the gods affected to be engaged with weightier matters,—the cultured widow of that derelict recalled the name of a gentleman in the East who was accustomed to buy tall clocks and fiddle-backed chairs, in her native New England, paying prices therefor to make one, in that conservative locality, rich beyond the dreams of avarice, almost.
Such was the cleverly devised circumstance that
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