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step-children. His wife was vain, extravagant, unfeeling, and had a
growing taste for private drinking; his step-daughter was mean and
over-reaching; and his step-son had conceived a violent dislike for him,
and lost no chance of showing it. The requirements of his business
pressed heavily upon him, and Mr. Wace does not think that he was
altogether free from occasional intemperance. He had begun life in a
comfortable position, he was a man of fair education, and he suffered,
for weeks at a stretch, from melancholia and insomnia. Afraid to disturb
his family, he would slip quietly from his wife's side, when his
thoughts became intolerable, and wander about the house. And about
three o'clock one morning, late in August, chance directed him into the
shop.
The dirty little place was impenetrably black except in one spot, where
he perceived an unusual glow of light. Approaching this, he discovered
it to be the crystal egg, which was standing on the corner of the
counter towards the window. A thin ray smote through a crack in the
shutters, impinged upon the object, and seemed as it were to fill its
entire interior.
It occurred to Mr. Cave that this was not in accordance with the laws of
optics as he had known them in his younger days. He could understand the
rays being refracted by the crystal and coming to a focus in its
interior, but this diffusion jarred with his physical conceptions. He
approached the crystal nearly, peering into it and round it, with a
transient revival of the scientific curiosity that in his youth had
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