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the impenetrable gloom of this silvan sanctuary? And if here we chose to perish by suicide or natural death—and famine is a natural death-what eye would ever look on our bones? Raving all; but so it often is with us in severest solitude-our dreams will be hideous with sin and death.

the degradation of sin that his soul deplores→→→ it is the guilt which he would expiate, if pos sible, in torments; it is the united sense of wrong, sin, guilt, degradation, shame, and remorse, that renders a moment's pang of the conscience more terrible to the good than years of any other punishment-and it thus is Hideous, said we, with sin and death? the power of the human soul to render its Thoughts that came flying against us like vul- whole life miserable by its very love of that tures, like vultures have disappeared, disap- virtue which it has fatally violated. This is a pointed of their prey, and afraid to fix their passion which the soul could not suffer-untalons in a thing alive. Hither-by some se- less it were immortal. Reason, so powerful cret and sacred impulse within the soul, that in the highest minds, would escape from the often knoweth not the sovereign virtue of its vain delusion; but it is in the highest minds own great desires-have we been led as into a where reason is most subjected to this awful penitentiary, where, before the altar of nature, power-they would seek reconcilement with we may lay down the burden of guilt or re-offended Heaven by the loss of all the happimorse, and walk out of the Forest a heaven- ness that earth ever yielded-and would repardoned man What guilt? O my soul! joice to pour out their heart's blood if it could canst thou think of Him who inhabiteth eter- wipe away from the conscience the stain of nity, and ask what guilt? What remorse?- one deep transgression! These are not the For the dereliction of duty every day since thou receivedst from Heaven the understanding of good and of evil. All our past existence gathers up into one dread conviction, that every man that is born of woman is a sinner, and worthy of everlasting death. Yet with the same dread conviction is interfused a knowledge, clear as the consciousness of present being, that the soul will live for ever. What was the meaning, O my soul! of all those transitory joys and griefs-of all those fears, hopes, loves, that so shook, each in its own fleeting season, the very foundations on which thy being in this life is laid? Anger, wrath, hatred, pride, and ambition-what are they all but so many shapes of sin coeval with thy birth? That sudden entrance of heaven's light into the Forest, was like the opening of the eye of God! And our spirit stands ashamed of its nakedness, because of the foulness and pollution of sin. But the awful thoughts that have travelled through its chambers have ventilated, swept, and cleansed them-and let us break away from beneath the weight of confession.

high-wrought and delusive states of mind of religious enthusiasts, passing away with the bodily agitation of the dreamer; but they are the feelings of the loftiest of men's sons-and when the troubled spirit has escaped from their burden, or found strength to support it, the conviction of their reasonableness and of their awful reality remains; nor can it be removed from the minds of the wise and virtuous, without the obliteration from the tablets of memory of all the moral judgments which conscience has there recorded.

It is melancholy to think that even in our own day, a philosopher, and one of high name too, should have spoken slightingly of the universal desire of immortality, as no argument at all in proof of it, because arising inevitably from the regret with which all men must regard the relinquishment of this life. By thus speaking of the desire as a delusion necessa rily accompanying the constitution of mind which it has pleased the Deity to bestow on us, such reasoners but darken the mystery both of man and of Providence. But this desire of immortality is not of the kind they say it is, nor does it partake, in any degree, of the character of a blind and weak feeling of regret at merely leaving this present life. "I would not live alway," is a feeling which all men understand-but who can endure the momentary thought of annihilation? Thousands, and tens of thousands-awful a thing as it is to die

Conscience! Speak not of weak and fantastic fears of abject superstitions-and of all that wild brood of dreams that have for ages been laws to whole nations; though we might speak of them-and, without violation of the spirit of true philosophy, call upon them to bear testimony to the truth. But think of the calm, purified, enlightened, and elevated con--are willing to do so-" passing through nascience of the highest natures-from which objectless fear has been excluded-and which hears, in its stillness, the eternal voice of God. What calm celestial joy fills all the being of a good man, when conscience tells him he is obeying God's law! What dismal fear and sudden remorse assail him, whenever he swerves but one single step out of the right path that is shining before his feet! It is not a mere selfish terror-it is not the dread of punishment only that appals him-for, on the contrary, he can calmly look on the punishment which he knows his guilt has incurred, and almost desires that it should be inflicted, that the incensed power may be appeased. It is the consciousness of offence that is unendurable -not the fear of consequent suffering; it is

ture to eternity"-nay, when the last hour comes, death almost always finds his victim ready, if not resigned. To leave earth, and all the light both of the sun and of the soul, is a sad thought to us all-transient as are human smiles, we cannot bear to see them no moreand there is a beauty that binds us to life in the tears of tenderness that the dying man sees gushing for his sake. But between that regret for departing loves and affections, and all the gorgeous or beautiful shows of this earth-between that love and the dread of annihilation, there is no connection. The soul can bear to part with all it loves-the soft voice-the kindling smile-the starting tear-and the pro foundest sighs of all by whom it is beloved L but it cannot bear to part with its existence

It cannot even believe the possibility of that which yet it may darkly dread. Its loves-its passions-its joys-its agonies are not itself. They may perish, but it is imperishable. Strip it of all it has seen, touched, enjoyed, or suffered-still it seems to survive-bury all it knew, or could know in the grave-but itself cannot be trodden down into the corruption. It sees nothing like itself in what perishes, except in dim analogies that vanish before its last profound self-meditation-and though it parts with its mortal weeds at last, as with a garment, its life is felt at last to be something not even in contrast with the death of the body, but to flow on like a flood, that we believe continues still to flow after it has entered into the unseen solitude of some boundless desert.

"Behind the cloud of death,

Once, I beheld a sun; a sun which gilt
That sable cloud, and turn'd it all to gold.
How the grave's altered! fathomless as hell!
A real hell to those who dream'd of heaven,
ANNIHILATION! How it yawns before me!
Next moment I may drop from thought, from sense,
The privilege of angels and of worms,
An outcast from existence! and this spirit,
This all-pervading, this all-conscious soul,
This particle of energy divine,

Which travels nature, flies from star to star,
And visits gods, and emulates their powers,
For ever is extinguish'd."

If intellect be, indeed, doomed utterly to perish, why may not we ask God, in that deep despair which, in that case, must inevitably flow from the consciousness of those powers with which he has at once blessed and cursed us-why that intellect, whose final doom is death, and that final doom within a moment, finds no thought that can satisfy it but that of Life, and no idea in which its flight can be lost but that of Eternity? If this earth were at once the soul's cradle and her tomb, why should that cradle have been hung amid the stars, and that tomb illumined by their eternal light? If, indeed, a child of the clay, was not this earth, with all its plains, forests, mountains, and seas, capacious enough for the dreams of that creature whose course was finally to be extinguished in the darkness of its bosom? What had we to do with planets, and suns, and spheres, "and all the dread magnificence of heaven?" Were we framed merely that we might for a few years rejoice in the beauty of the stars, as in that of the flowers beneath our feet? And ought we to be grateful for those transitory glimpses of the heavens, as for the fading splendour of the earth? But the heavens are not an idle show, hung out for the gaze of that idle dreamer Man. They are the work of the Eternal God, and he has given us power therein to read and to understand his glory. It is not our eyes only that are dazzled by the face of heaven our souls can comprehend the laws by which that face is overspread by its celestial smiles. The dwelling-place of our spirits is already in the heavens. Well are we entitled to give names unto the stars; for we know the moment of their rising and their setting, and can be with them at every part of their shining journey through the boundless ether. While generations of men have lived, died, and are buried, the astronomer thinks of the golden orb that shone centuries ago within the

vision of man, and lifts up his eye undoubting at the very moment when it again comes glorious on its predicted return. Were the Eter nal Being to slacken the course of a planet, of increase even the distance of the fixed stars, the decree would be soon known on earth Our ignorance is great, because so is our knowledge; for it is from the mightiness and vastness of what we do know that we imagine the illimitable unknown creation. And to whom has God made these revelations! To a worm that next moment is to be in darkness? To a piece of earth momentarily raised into breathing existence? To a soul perish. able as the telescope through which it looks into the gates of heaven?

"Oh! star-eyed science, hast thou wander'd there
To waft us home-the message of despair?"
No; there is no despair in the gracious light
of heaven. As we travel through those orbs,
we feel indeed that we have no power, but we
feel that we have mighty knowledge. We can
create nothing, but we can dimly understand
all. It belongs to God only to create, but it is
given to man to know-and that knowledge is
itself an assurance of immortality.

"Renounce St. Evremont, and read St. Paul.
Ere rapt by miracle, by reason wing'd,
His mounting mind made long abode in heaven.
This is freethinking, unconfined to parts,
To send the soul, on curious travel bent,
Through all the provinces of human thought:
To dart her flight through the whole sphere of man;
Of this vast universe to make the tour;
In each recess of space and time, at home;
Familiar with their wonders: diving deep;
And like a prince of boundless interests there,
Still most ambitious of the most remote ;
To look on truth unbroken, and entire ;
Truth in the system, the full orb; where truths;
By truths enlighten'd and sustain'd, afford
An arcblike, strong foundation, to support
Th' incumbent weight of absolute, complete
Conviction here, the more we press, we stand
More firm; who most examine, most believe.
Parts, like half-sentences, confound: the whole
Conveys the sense, and GOD is understood,
Who not in fragments writes to human race.
Read his whole volume, skeptic! then reply."

Renounce St. Evremont! Ay, and many a Deistical writer of higher repute now in the world. But how came they by the truths they did know? Not by the work of their own un assisted faculties for they lived in a Christian country; they had already been imbued with many high and holy beliefs, of which-had they willed it-they could never have got rid; and to the very last the light which they, in their pride, believed to have emanated from the inner shrine—the penetralia of Philosophycame from the temples of the living God. They walked all their lives long-though they knew it not, or strived to forget it-in the light of revelation, which, though often darkened to men's eyes by clouds from earth, was still shining strong in heaven. Had the New Tes tament never been-think ye that men in their pride, though

"Poor sons of a day," could have discerned the necessity of framing for themselves a religion of humility? No. As by pride, we are told the angels fell-so by pride man, after his miserable fall, strove to lift up his helpless being from the dust; and though trailing himself, soul and body, along

torrent dashes through the centre-but no vil lages-only a few woodmen's shielings will appear on its banks; for it is a torrent of pre cipices, where the shrubs that hang midway from the cleft are out of the reach of the spray of its cataracts, even when the red Garroch is in flood.

he soiling earth, and glorying in his own cor- now a noise as of "thunder heard remote." ruption, sought to eternize here his very sins Waterfalls-hundreds of waterfalls sounding by naming the stars of heaven after heroes, for ever-here-there-everywhere-among conquerors, murderers, violators of the man- the remoter woods. Northwards one fierce dates of the Maker whom they had forgotten, or whose attributes they had debased by their own foul imaginations. They believed themselves, in the delusion of their own idolatries, to be "Lords of the world and Demigods of Fame," while they were the slaves of their own sins and their own sinful Deities. Should we have been wiser in our generation than they, but for the Bible? If in moral speculation we hear but little-too little-of the confession of what it owes to the Christian religion-in all the Philosophy, nevertheless, that is pure and of good report, we see that "the day-spring from on high has visited it." In all philosophic inquiry there is, perhaps, a tendency to the soul's exaltation of itself-which the spirit and genius of Christianity subdues. It is not sufficient to say that a natural sense of our own infirmities will do so-for seldom indeed have Deists been lowly-minded. They have talked proudly of humility. Compare their moral meditations with those of our great divines. Their thoughts and feelings are of the "earth earthy;" but when we listen to those others, we feel that their lore has been Godgiven.

"It is as if an angel shook his wings."

Thus has Christianity glorified Philosophy; its celestial purity is now the air in which intellect breathes. In the liberty and equality of that religion, the soul of the highest Philosopher dare not offend that of the humblest peasant. Nay, it sometimes stands rebuked before it-and the lowly dweller in the hut, or the shieling on the mountain side, or in the forest, could abash the proudest son of Science, by pointing to the Sermon of our Saviour on the Mount-and saying, "I see my duties to man and God here!" The religious establishments of Christianity, therefore, have done more not only to support the life of virtue, but to show all its springs and sources, than all the works of all the Philosophers who have ever expounded its principles or its practice.

Many hours have we been in the wilderness, and our heart yearns again for the cheerful dwellings of men. Sweet infant streamlet, that flows by our feet without a murmur, so shallow are yet thy waters-wilt thou-short as hitherto has been thy journeying—wilt thou be our guide out into the green valleys and the blue heaven, and the sight once more of the bright sunshine and the fair fleecy clouds? No other clue to the labyrinth do we seek but that small, thin, pure, transparent thread of silver, which neither bush nor brier will break, and which will wind without entanglement round the roots of the old trees, and the bases of the shaggy rocks. As if glad to escape from its savage birthplace, the small rivulet now gives utterance to a song; and sliding down shelving rocks, so low in their mossy verdure as hardly to deserve that name, glides along the almost level lawns, here and there disclosing a little hermit flower. No danger now of its being imbibed wholly by the thirsty earth; for it has a channel and banks of its own-and there is a waterfall! Thence forwards the rivulet never loses its merry voice-and in an hour it is a torrent. What beautiful symptoms now of its approach to the edge of the Forest! Wandering lights and whispering airs are here visitants-and there the blue eye of a wild violet looking up from the ground! The glades are more frequentmore frequent open spaces cleared by the woodman's axe-and the antique Oak-Tree all alone by itself, itself a grove. The torrent may be called noble now; and that deep blue atmosphere-or say rather, that glimmer of purple air-lies over the Strath in which a great River rolls along to the Sea.

Ha! what has brought thee hither, thou Nothing in all nature more beautiful than wide-antlered king of the red-deer of Braemar, the boundary of a great Highland Forest. from the spacious desert of thy hills of storm? Masses of rocks thrown together in magnifiEre now we have heheld thee, or one stately cent confusion, many of them lichened and as thee, gazing abroad, from a rock over the weather-stained with colours gorgeous as the heather, to all the points of heaven; and soon eyed plumage of the peacock, the lustre of the as our figure was seen far below, leading the rainbow, or the barred and clouded glories of van of the flight thou went'st haughtily away setting suns-some towering aloft with trees into the wilderness. But now thou glidest sown in the crevices by bird or breeze, and softly and slowly through the gloom-no watch- checkering the blue sky-others bare, black, fulness, no anxiety in thy large beaming eyes; abrupt, grim as volcanoes, and shattered as if and, kneeling among the hoary mosses, layest by the lightning-stroke. Yet interspersed, thyself down in unknown fellowship with one places of perfect peace-circles among the tali of those human creatures, a glance of whose heather, or taller lady-fern, smoothed into vel. eye, a murmur of whose voice, would send vet, it is there easy to believe, by Fairies' feet thee belling through the forest, terrified by the-rocks where the undisturbed linnet hangs flash or sound that bespoke a hostile nature her nest among the blooming briars, all float. wont to pursue thy race unto death.-The ing with dew draperies of honeysuckle alive hunter is upon thee-away-away! Sudden as a shooting-star up springs the red-deer, and in the gloom as suddenly is ost. On-on-on! further into he Forest!-and

with bees-glades green as emerald, where lie the lambs in tempered sunshine, or haply a lovely doe reposes with her fawn; and further down, where the fields half belong to the moun

tain and half to the strath, the smoke of hidden huts-a log-bridge flung across the torrent-a hanging garden, and a little broomy knoll, with a few laughing children at play, almost as wildlooking as the wanderers of the woods!

Turn your eyes, if you can, from that lovely wilderness, and behold down along a milebroad Strath, fed by a thousand torrents, floweth the noblest of Scotia's rivers, the strongsweeping Spey! Let Imagination launch her canoe, and be thou a solitary steersman-for need is none of oar or sail; keep the middle course while all the groves go by, and ere the sun has sunk behind yon golden mountains-nay, mountains they are not, but a transitory pomp of clouds-thou mayest list the roaring, and behold the foaming of

the Sea.

Was there ever such a descriptive dream of a coloured engraving of the Cushat, Quest, of Ring-Dove, dreamt before? Poor worn-out and glimmering candle!-whose wick of light and life in a few more flickerings will be no more-what a contrast dost thou present with thyself of eight hours ago! Then, truly, wert thou a shining light, and high aloft in the room. gloaming burned thy clear crest like a starduring its midnight silence, a memento mori of which our spirit was not afraid. Now thou art dying-dying-dead! Our cell is in darkness. But methinks we see another-a purer-a clearer light—one more directly from Heaven. We touch but a spring in a wooden shutterand lo! the full blaze of day. Oh! why should we mortal beings dread that night-prison-the Grave?

DR. KITCHINER.

FIRST COURSE.

Ir greatly grieved us to think that Dr. Kitchiner should have died before our numerous avocations had allowed us an opportunity of dining with him, and subjecting to the test-act of our experienced palate his claims to immortality as a Cook and a Christian. The Doctor had, we know, a dread of Us-not altogether unallayed by delight; and on the dinner to Us, which he had meditated for nearly a quarter of a century, he knew and felt must have hung his reputation with posterity-his posthumous fame. We understand that there is an unfinished sketch of that Dinner among the Doctor's papers, and that the design is magnificent. Yet, perhaps, it is better for his glory that Kitchiner should have died without attempting to imbody in forms the Idea of that Dinner. It might have been a failure. How liable to imperfection the matériel on which he would have had to work! How defective the instruments! Yes yes!-happier far was it for the good old man that he should have fallen asleep with the undimmed idea of that unattempted Dinner in his imagination, than, vainly contending with the physical evil inherent in matter, have detected the Bishop's foot in the first course, and died of a broken heart!

"Travelling," it is remarked by our poor dear dead Doctor in his Traveller's Oracle," is a recreation to be recommended, especially to those whose employments are sedentary-who are engaged in abstract studies-whose minds have been sunk in a state of morbid melancholy by hypochondriasis, or, by what is worst of all, a lack of domestic felicity. Nature, however, will not suffer any sudden transition; and therefore it is improper for people accustomed to a sedentary life to undertake suddenly a journey, during which they will be exposed to long and violent jolting. The case

here is the same as if one accustomed to drink water, should, all at once, begin to drink wine."

Had the Doctor been alive, we should have asked him what he meant by "long and violent jolting ?" Jolting is now absolutely unknown in England, and it is of England the Doctor speaks. No doubt, some occasional jolting might still be discovered among the lanes and cross-roads; but, though violent, it could not be long: and we defy the most se dentary gentleman living to be more so, when sitting in an easy chair by his parlour fireside, than in a cushioned carriage spinning along the turnpike. But for the trees and hedge rows all galloping by, he would never know that he was himself in motion. The truth is, that no gentleman can be said, now-a-days, to lead a sedentary life, who is not constantly travelling before the insensible touch of M'Adam. Look at the first twenty people that come towering by on the roof of a Highflier or a Defiance. What can be more sedentary! Only look at that elderly gentleman with the wig, evidently a parson, jammed in between a brace of buxom virgins on their way down to Doncaster races. Could he be more sedentary, during the psalm, in his own pulpit?

We must object, too, to the illustration of wine and water. Let no man who has been so unfortunate as to be accustomed to drink water, be afraid all at once to begin to drink wine. Let him, without fear or trembling, boldly fill bumpers to the Throne-the Navy— and the Army. These three bumpers will have made him a new man. We have no objection whatever to his drinking, in animated succession, the Apotheosis of the Whigs-the Angler's delight-the Cause of Liberty all over the World-Christopher North-Maga the Im mortal. "Nature will not suffer any sudden transition!" Will she not? Look at our water drinker now! His very own mother

could not know him-he has lost all resem- | ing that he should spend his honeymoon among blance to his twin-brother, from whom, two the gravel beds of Kinnaird or Moulenearn, or short hours ago, you could not have distinguished him but for a slight scar on his brow -so completely is his apparent personal identity lost, that it would be impossible for him to establish an alibi. He sees a figure in the mirror above the chimney-piece, but has not the slightest suspicion that the rosy-faced Bacchanal is himself, the water-drinker; but then he takes care to imitate the manual exercise of the phantom-lifting his glass to his lips at the very same moment, as if they were both moved by one soul.

The Doctor then wisely remarks, that it is "impossible to lay down any rule by which to regulate the number of miles a man may journey in a day, or to prescribe the precise number of ounces he ought to eat; but that nature has given us a very excellent guide in a sense of lassitude, which is as unerring in exercise as the sense of satiety is in eating."

the rocky sofas of the Tummel, or the green marble couches of the Tilt. What has be come now of "the sense of satiety in eating?" John-the castors!-mustard-vinegar-cay enne-catchup-peas and potatoes, with a very little butter-the biscuit called "rusk"-and the memory of the hotch-potch is as that of Babylon the Great. That any gigot of mutton, exquisite though much of the five-year-old blackfaced must assuredly be, can, with any rational hopes of success, contend against a haunch of venison, will be asserted by no devout lover of truth. Try the two by alternate platefuls, and you will uniformly find that you leave off after the venison. That "sense of satiety in eating," of which Dr. Kitchiner speaks, was produced by the Tay salmon devoured above-but of all the transitory feelings of us transitory creatures on our transit through this transitory world, in which the We say the Doctor wisely remarks, yet not Doctor asserts nature will not suffer any sudaltogether wisely; for the rule does not seem den transitions, the most transitory ever expeto hold always good either in exercise or in rienced by us is "the sense of satiety in eateating. What more common than to feel one's- ing." Therefore, we have now seen it for a self very much fatigued-quite done up as it moment existing on the disappearance of the were, and unwilling to stir hand or foot. Up hotch-potch-dying on the appearance of the goes a lark in heaven-tira-lira-or suddenly Tay salmon-once more noticeable as the last the breezes blow among the clouds, who forth- plate of the noble fish melted away-extinwith all begin campaigning in the sky-or, guished suddenly by the vision of the venison quick as lightning, the sunshine in a moment-again felt for an instant, and but for an inresuscitates a drowned day-or tripping along, stant-for a brace and a half of as fine grouse all by her happy self, to the sweet accompani- as ever expanded their voluptuous bosoms to ment of her joy-varied songs, the woodman's daughter passes by on her way, with a basket in her hand, to her father in the forest, who has already laid down his axe on the meridian shadow darkening one side of the straight stem of an oak, beneath whose grove might be drawn up five score of plumed chivalry! Where is your "sense of lassitude now, nature's unerring guide in exercise?" You spring up from the mossy wayside bank, and renewed both in mind and body, " rejoicing in Nature's joy," you continue to pass over houseless moors, by small, single, solitary, straw-roofed huts, through villages gathered round Stone Cross, Elm Grove, or old Monastic Tower, till, unwearied in lith and limb, you see sunset beautifying all the west, and drop in, perhaps, among the hush of the Cottar's Saturday Night -for it is in sweet Scotland we are walking in our dream and know not, till we have stretched ourselves on a bed of rushes or of heather, that "kind Nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep," is yet among the number of our bosom friends-alas! daily diminishing beneath fate fortune, the sweeping scythe-stroke of death, or the whisper of some one poor, puny, idle, and unmeaning word!

be devoured by hungry love! Sense of satiety in eating, indeed! If you please, my dear friend, one of the backs-pungent with the most palate-piercing, stomach-stirring, heartwarming, soul-exalting of all tastes-the wild bitter-sweet.

66

But the Doctor returns to the subject of travelling-and fatigue. When one begins," he says, "to be low-spirited and dejected, to yawn often and be drowsy, when the appetite is impaired, when the smallest movement occasions a fluttering of the pulse, when the mouth becomes dry, and is sensible of a bitter taste, seek refreshment and repose, if you wish to PREVENT ILLNESS, already beginning to take place." Why, our dear Doctor, illness in such a deplorable case as this, is just about to end, and death is beginning to take place. Thank Heaven, it is a condition to which we do not remember having very nearly approximated! Who ever saw us yawn? or drowsy? cr with our appetite impaired, except on the withdrawal of the table-cloth? or low-spirited, but when the Glenlivet was at ebb? Who dare declare that he ever saw our mouth dry? or sensible of a bitter taste, since we gave over munching rowans? Put your finger on our wrist, at Then, as to the sense of satiety in eating." any moment you choose, from June to JanuIt is produced in us by three platefuls of hotch-ary, from January to June, and by its pulsation potch-and, to the eyes of an ordinary ob- you may rectify Harrison's or Kendal's chroserver, our dinner would seem to be at an end. nometer. But no-strictly speaking, it is just going to begin. About an hour ago did we, standing on the very beautiful bridge of Perth, see that identical salmon, with his back-fin just visible above the translucent tide, arrowing up the Tay, bold as a bridegroom, and nothing doubt

But the Doctor proceeds-"By raising the temperature of my room to about 65°, a broth diet, and taking a tea-spoonful of Epsom salts in half a pint of warm water, and repeating i' every half hour till it moves the bowels twic or thrice, and retiring to rest an hour or two

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