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THE BLACK DWARF.
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entertained at an exterior so dreadfully inauspicious."

"And did they judge truly?"

"You shall hear. He at least was fully aware of his own deficiency; the sense of it haunted him like a phantom. 'I am,' was his own expression to me,—I mean to a man whom he trusted, 'I am, in spite of what you would say, a poor miserable outcast, fitter to have been smothered in the cradle than to have been brought up to scare the world in which I crawl.' The person whom he addressed in vain endeavoured to impress him with the indifference to external form, which is the natural result of philosophy, or entreat him to recal the superiority of mental talents to the more attractive attributes that are merely personal. 'I hear you,' he would reply; but you speak the voice of cold-blooded Stoicism, or, at least, of friendly partiality. But look at every book which we have read, those excepted of that