Electricity isn't my prescription."
The energetic young Mr. Cashell snorted within, and Shaynor settled
himself up in his chair over which he had thrown a staring red, black, and
yellow Austrian jute blanket, rather like a table-cover. I cast about,
amid patent medicine pamphlets, for something to read, but finding little,
returned to the manufacture of the new drink. The Italian warehouse took
down its game and went to bed. Across the street blank shutters flung back
the gaslight in cold smears; the dried pavement seemed to rough up in
goose-flesh under the scouring of the savage wind, and we could hear, long
ere he passed, the policeman flapping his arms to keep himself warm.
Within, the flavours of cardamoms and chloric-ether disputed those of the
pastilles and a score of drugs and perfume and soap scents. Our electric
lights, set low down in the windows before the tunbellied Rosamund jars,
flung inward three monstrous daubs of red, blue, and green, that broke
into kaleidoscopic lights on the facetted knobs of the drug-drawers, the
cut-glass scent flagons, and the bulbs of the sparklet bottles. They
flushed the white-tiled floor in gorgeous patches; splashed along the
nickel-silver counter-rails, and turned the polished mahogany counter-
panels to the likeness of intricate grained marbles--slabs of porphyry and
malachite. Mr. Shaynor unlocked a drawer, and ere he began to write, took
out a meagre bundle of letters.
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