CHAPTER XVIILOVE LIMERICKS OF A LEFT-TENANT

CHAPTER XVIILOVE LIMERICKS OF A LEFT-TENANT

Thenext morning the men were off early to inspect the new yacht and to assist Walter in “bending on” the last make-shift sail. Jawn, however, went reluctantly.

“It’s a beautiful view from here,” he objected lazily; “why go down into it and mess it up with us? We don’t help the landscape much. We’re not a set of Corot dancing wood-nymphs.”

Richard tried to tell him that it was imperative to study Walter at first hand.

“Nymphs, now,” Jawn went on, boldly disregarding all Richard’s patter. “Nymphs, now, is a good suggestive word. It stimulates the rhyming sense. You see there a hard word and you say to yourself, Can it be done? And you reply, If it is the business of a man to do ’t I’ll do ’t. U-m!...”

He waved a large forefinger, beating time to a story of “two pale gentleman nymphs” made ineffably fragile through the fact that their “forbears were lacking in lymphs.”

Walter had gone on ahead. Richard and Jawn were following slowly.

“I had rather stay and add more kindling to my fire of devotion.” Jawn turned in the road and flung a stage kiss at the Ionic columns.

“It is a fine old house,” grinned Richard; “I don’t wonder at your devotion to it.”

“Humph!” Jawn grunted as he trudged down the hill. “Do you think I am attached to the architecture like a bit of indecent ivy? It’s not a parasite, I am. I’m a—what’s an amorite, friend Richard? Hasn’t it something to do with the divine passion?”

“Amorite?” Richard studied. “That’s the sexton, isn’t it? The chap who marches ahead of the rector carrying a banner or something. You wouldn’t do for that at all, Jawn.”

“Ach! You’re thinking of acolyte, you fool. You can’t pass me on ecclesiastical forms; I was once a sweet cherub of an altar boy and know all about such matters. No,” he sighed; “it’s no leanings toward priesthood I have; but something entirely worldly and fleshly and devilly.”

“How many does this make, Jawn?”

“How many?” he retorted. “I suppose you mean to imply that my devotion lacks in constancy?”

“Oh, you are constant enough!” Richard laughed. “You’re always completely gone on some girl—always.”

“It’s a terrible infirmity.”

“Did you bring your book with you?”

“Yes,” snapped Jawn.

“Well, what number is this one?”

“Seventy-seven. But you needn’t grin so sarcastic like; I’m feeling that this is the final number.”

“How so?”

“I’m no astrologer,” Jawn explained, “but I have eyes in my head. Now, anyone can see how mystical and sonorous is the number seventy-seven. If you multiply the first digit by the second digit you getforty-nine; and if you divide immediately by the second digit you get the golden number seven. If you add the first digit to the second digit you get fourteen, which divided by the number of digits, two you get back your golden number seven. And there you have four golden number sevens dancing before you like a bunch of four-leaf clover.”

“And if you subtract the first digit from the second digit,” Richard suggested, “you get nothing.”

“Precisely!” cried Jawn. “And in the occult language of figurology any novice would read, ‘Here endeth the list of heart-broken maidens; behold! there will be no more!’”

“Jawn,” said Richard, “I think I know the reason why you always fail.”

“Fail!” Jawn exploded. “I never fail. The sad part of the business is that I always succeed. Scattered over the eastern and middle-western United States are seventy-six forlorn women of all years who are now hopelessly married to men they must hate. For why? When Lazarus came back from the gates of Paradise do you suppose he ever again took delight in the left-overs from Dives’ table? No more they. But what could I do? Unbidden the amorous passion came and swift and unbidden it went. So what could I do but write their names in a book, add the date of their amorous demise——”

“Which always corresponded to the date of their wedding!”

“Exactly. You wouldn’t have me getting mixed up with the unwritten laws of the land, would you? I simply write their names and add a touching obituary limerick.”

Richard suggested that the seventy-seventh limerick—sinceJawn was so assured that it would be the last—should end the series, and that the collection be published.

“It would add to your fame as a poet,” Richard argued, “immortalize the ladies in everlasting verse and bring you a financial heart-balm.”

Jawn mused over the possible titles. “‘The Seventy-seven Amours,’” he tried out one. “Sounds too much like a history of Chicago.... ‘Love Limericks.’ No. There’s a female touch to that that I don’t like.... Ah! I have it! ‘Love Limericks of a Left-tenant.’ It’s thoroughly male and gives the proper Irish picture of a forcible eviction!”

“Have you written Jerry’s yet?” Richard asked.

“What, man!” Jawn affected great disgust. “Would you write an obituary verse while the corpse is still sitting up and drinking beer with you? Have you no artistic sense? Of course not! Well, then, have you even common decency?”

“Well,” Richard probed him. “I thought as this one was going to be the climax you would take a running start, as it were.”

“Yes!” Jawn was derisive. “I know your sort. You’re the kind who sample all the bottles before the wake begins, and start premature explosions which spoil the solemnity and gaiety of the rest of the mourners. Besides, there ain’t going to be no corpse this time. Ergo, there won’t be no limerick. It’ll be an ode I’ll write, a bursting prothalamium, a lyrical celebration of the joys of requited affection.”

They were now coming in sight of Walter at work.

“No, it won’t,” said Richard. “It will be a limerick like all the others. You are doomed to failure, Jawn; and the reason is that you ply your amours too well.You are a professional. You are too perfect. There’s not a flaw in your attack, and therefore you fail to attract. It’s the perfect manufactured article versus the crude hand-made bit of craftsmanship. No; Jawn, I fear you’ll die a Left-tenant.”

“I fear so,” admitted Jawn cheerfully. “I fear so; and I hope so! Lord love you! My memory is so full of delicious experiences that I’d feel like Bluebeard if I ever settled down to simple domestic servitude. And I wouldn’t like it, I know. Ach! I’d rather be a left-tenant every day in the week than a major-domo for ever.”

While they waited on the dock for Walter to row in with the tender, Richard asked Jawn what he thought of the boy.

“What do I think of him?” Jawn echoed. “Well, to speak in technical language which all the world understands, I think he’s a damned young fool.”

Richard pressed him to look at the case seriously.

“This is no case for me,” said Jawn decisively. “He’s got a screw loose. It’s hardware he needs,” Jawn tapped his head, “and I’m not in the business. Besides, I’m on my vacation. You doctor him. I’m too busy. I’m specializing on the sister.”

Jawn was obstinately determined to enjoy his vacation. He was willing to psychologize all winter, he said, and in the Summer School when compelled by the Dean, but vacation means “to vacate,” he protested; and that means to let your mind loaf, and be silly, and wallow in its uncultivated, native soil.

Jawn was a very modern type of American “professor” and corresponded not at all to the conventional conception. He was not beetle-eyed, nor ponderous, nor absent-minded, a picture we have borrowed fromEurope where dignity is demanded of the professor, and all the pompous qualities of solemnity. The European sort exists in America, too—he was the original settler!—but side by side is a distinctive American variety. The American type came in in the late ’80’s and early ’90’s when college teachers were ceasing to be so stiffly clerical in physical and mental cut; he arrived just at the time, too, when mere opinions in a professor began to be suggestive of lazy charlatanism, a time when all this new cult of laboratory research, exact measuring, statistical proof, historical evidence from first-hand sources, was beginning to be demanded of the man who professed anything.

This new sort of professor is quite apt to look on the professional title as a joke, except in so far as it is a distinction that carries real difference in wages. We remember with what sturdy and solemn posing the professor of yester-year would wear his titles; how deftly he would correct the forgetful who lapsed into “Mr.”! How he would announce himself as “Professor” with such simple faith in its power to awe the unrefined! Jawn was a perfect example of the newer school which, we fear, has gone to the other extreme: it lacks terribly in dignity; in fact, it suspects all dignity of a subtle attempt to counterfeit intelligence—which is often the case!—it is careless of mere external show, but it toils like an Edison. It works hard when it works, and it plays with the abandon of a nest of puppies; it smokes, it drinks, it sings the wildest songs at purely male meetings; it employs the colloquialisms of the street; it tosses ball with the boys on the town lot; and, to oblige a friend, it may stay up all night to play poker. And on a holiday—which may be a night off, or a week-end—it “cuts up” as if life were just beer and skittles.

This modern investigator-professor is the despair of his European confrères, for, we must admit it, he lacks culture. He knows so much of one thing that he elects to know nothing of anything else, and cheerfully owns up; indeed every other speech is a confession of some sort of ignorance. And he lacks, he woefully lacks polish; and often—although there are tailored dandies among them—he lacks simple brushing and scouring!

In his clinics Jawn Galloway tended his awkward flock of wayward children—the mentally twisted and the morally awry—with the dignity and the sweetness of a Roman cardinal. He was genial and sympathetic, but he was also strong and masterful. In the clinic no one thought of him with other feeling than that of respect for his wise mind, his deft hand, his atmosphere of confidence. Over twenty thousand cases of wrong-mindedness had come under his observation; he had held himself to a laboratory vigil of from twelve to fourteen hours a day for months at a time; and his “notes” had formulated a new theory and practice in dealing with the abnormal mind. In his clinics he was learned without pedantry, and wise without snobbishness; but off duty he was a perpetual sophomore—often, we fear, equally as irritating to mature persons. His boisterous laughter got on one’s nerves; his persistent doggerel, his bubbling vivacity, his everlasting acting-a-part stirred many a less highly strung person to combativeness. “He a professor!” was the commonest remark voiced by fellow vacationists who did not know of his serious work. Of course they could not be aware that his perfected scale for measuring the intelligence of morons had brought him the approval of the most serious-minded men in Europe and America.

His friends had often to apologize for Jawn Galloway, for the type is not yet conventionalized. Our comic papers continue to make the professor a deep-browed simpleton, and our novels and our drama perpetuate the picture; but that sort is as obsolete as Ichabod Crane.

“All right,” Richard nodded at Jawn’s persistent flippancy. “I’ll wait. You’re resting—I know you! You’re just skylarking to get your mind cleaned up. I’ll wait. And one of these days Walter’s case will seize you as it has me. You’ll get fascinated. I know you! And then we’ll get something out of this visit; you’ll sing another song instead——”

“Instead of just Lewis-carrolling, eh?” Jawn laughed.

“All right,” laughed Richard in turn. “I’ll wait. But you’ll work for your wittles yet, old boy!”

Any further talk was cut short by the approach of Walter.

“A left-tenant never made a good sailor,” said Jawn, as he stepped on the yacht. “But here I am to serve as ordered and, if necessary, go down with the ship. Which is the saloon deck, and if this is it, where’s the bar?”

The old sail lifted creakingly, the jib fluttered and filled, and theSago-ye-wat-hamoved off smoothly for its maiden trip on the waters of Lake Keuka.

Jawn was instructed in managing the starboard sidestays. It was made clear to him that when the mainsail was swung over on the port side the strain was enough to split the mast unless he fastened the sustaining rope, or “stay,” securely to the cleats before him. When she came about he was to loosen the “stay” on his side while Richard quickly secured the supporting port “stay.”

“So I’m to loosen her stays, am I?” queried Jawn.

“Yes; and tighten them up, too, when we give you the word, or that stick will snap off like a tree on the path of a cyclone.”

“And when you say the word,” he repeated the orders, “I’m to lace ’em up again, eh?”

“That’s not the technical phrase,” laughed Richard, “but it will do.”

“Another reason why a ship is called a she,” said Jawn. “I think the minstrel troupes of the country have missed that one.... It’s a strange thing, now,” he mused, “for a modest young man like me to be squatting here in the bodice of the ship—I hope I’m using the proper language—sitting here in the bodice of the ship with life and death in the balance. Still, if I survive you, I’ll put the thing in proper nautical language for the local papers: ‘Suddenly on Friday last the good shipWhat’s-her-namecapsized in a sudden squall and was slowly strangled to death because no one was able to reach her in time to loosen her stays.’”

Walter was very well pleased with his boat. Out in the main body of water he tried her under all sorts of conditions and had little brushes with other yachts, one or two of which were “Class A scows,” and it seemed always that theSago-ye-wat-hacould overhaul anything either on short tack or long reach.

They tacked up the Lake under a stiff northeaster, which gave Jawn plenty of practice in attending properly to the “stays.” When they prepared to put about and came back the wind dropped to a light breeze. So they slipped along leisurely, taking over an hour to round Bluff Point. During this time of lazy inactivity Jawn, relieved of his duties, found his voice. He sang songs, offered connundrums, stories and impromptulimericks. Several times during his chat he had forgotten himself and called Richard by another name. Walter became alert. When it had happened more than once, he spoke up.

“Tryin’ to work me, are you?” he asked, “like you do the women?”

Jawn did not see the point and asked him what in the name of the seven devils he meant. Jawn Galloway could be a very belligerent fellow at times.

“Oh, nothin’; on’y them names don’t fool me.” Walter modified his tone discreetly; one could easily take the spirit out of him. “I know he ain’t Richard, and I know he ain’t the other one, either.”

“But I am the ‘other one,’ Walter,” Richard soothed him.

“Like hell y’are!”

“Hey!” cried Jawn, searching about for a weapon. “Drop that Billy Sunday talk or I’ll lam you over the head with a——” he kicked about among several tools lying at his feet—“where the blazes do you keep your marlin-spikes? Have to have a marlin-spike. If I were on land, now, I’d knock you down with my fist or just kick you in the stomach, but the etiquette of the sea demands marlin-spikes. What sort of a ship do you call this?”

Walter did not know whether to be amused or scared. Jawn could roar like Bottom, the weaver. But he decided, finally, that the situation was not as perilous as it sounded.

“He’s a big gun, he is—that fellow,” he went on, with his thought on the name. “But you ain’t.”

“He has heard of my father, Jawn.” Richard turned quickly. “You know I wrote you that he knew; he found one of my cards on the steamer. The name wasfamiliar to him, naturally; but he did not know that father and I had the same names; and he did not know of father’s death.”

“Everyone knows about it,” snapped Jawn.

“Of course, Walter,” Richard explained, “when father died I was no longer a ‘junior.’ We have the same name. Naturally you had never heard of me. I have the distinguished name and have done nothing to earn it. That’s why I am so contented with this nondescript Mr. Richard. You can’t imagine how pleasant it is not to be questioned and stared at. It’s a dreadful nuisance to have distinguished parents.”

“Please don’t be disrespectful to the father of my own offspring,” Jawn objected. “I’m getting to be a notorious character, with my name in the print every time a bug gets loose in somebody’s head. By the time my children come along I’ll be as famous as Mr. Riley whom they speak of so highly; I mean Mr. Riley who keeps the hotel. Have you heard the song, Walter? Well, you will.” And he sung it as only an Irishman can.

So they were going to keep up the bluff, act it out boldly; they were a daring lot, thought Walter; but they couldn’t fool him.

“If he’s the B-Big Gun,” Walter persisted, “he’d be r-rich.”

“No, Walter,” Richard was very patient. “That was father’s money, not mine. He made it, not I. Since I left college I have been making my own way. Money doesn’t interest me, especially money I have never earned. I couldn’t be happy with it; it would be just a refined sort of slavery, and I have always preferred to be free. Let’s don’t talk about it, if you don’t mind.”

“But I don’t see——” Walter began.

“Then shut up!” cried Jawn brutally.

“Jawn!” remonstrated Richard.

“By George, I’m forgetting myself!” Jawn showed all his big teeth in an expansive grin. “Listen at me shutting up the captain of the boat! It’s mutiny they’ll be charging me with, and be hanging me at the yardarm.” He cocked an eye aloft. “Is that her yardarm, up there, sticking indecently out of the top of her stays?”

The laughter that followed reassured Walter, but he was careful not to bring up the topic of names again. These were dangerous fellows and he had best keep in with them. They could do what they pleased so long as they left his preserves alone. The comforting thought made him watch the shore carefully—they had turned Bluff Point and were tacking into the Branch; and after a time he was rewarded by a flutter of something white on Phœbe’s porch. She had been watching for him, too; and was waving a welcome home. The breeze strengthened almost in answer to his own exultation, and shortly they were dropping sails before the Norris dock.

“Aye! aye! Captain Wells!” she called. “An’ how is everything for’ard?”

“Aw right!” he grinned.

“What’s your cargo—garden truck or cattle?” She pretended not to distinguish the men at first. “Ach! It’s the two gentlemen pirates out of the movies! Ahoy, you two! What’s the latest news of the police courts?”

Jawn put his hands together and megaphoned, “Woman arrested for speeding. Her tongue ran away with her head.”

“That joke is in Genesis,” she retorted. It is, no doubt, an aged masculine fling.

“Sure!” he called back as they stepped up on the dock. “If Eve had been deaf and dumb we’dallbe in Paradise yet.”

“Ye devil!” she answered.

“You flatter the ould Boy,” said he.

“Ooh!” she shivered, “is he worse than you?”

“Much worse.”

“Don’t add to the terrors o’ death, man, but come in and have a cup o’ tea. I set it a-brewin’ the moment I saw you.”

Walter could not be persuaded to leave his boat until every sail was furled and stowed away properly. He took his time over it, too; for he knew instinctively that he could not shine before Phœbe in the presence of such glib gentlemen. They were shining gloriously when he appeared, and their free laughter set him a-grinning before he knew the cause.

“Walter,” Phœbe called, “you’re the jury. I’m puttin’ these two good-lookin’ gentlemen through a cross-examination. Up to this moment I’ve been the judge and the prosecuting attorney and the jury, too; but it’s tryin’ on the nerves. I’m glad you came in when you did. The prisoners were insultin’ the Court with indecent flattery. I need a tipstave and a sheriff’s posse, I do. Sit ye there, boy; and decide fair. The charge against these two malefactors——”

“I object, your honour,” interrupted Jawn. “We can’t be malefactors until the charge is proved against us. You’ll be prejudicing the jury against us before he has finished his cup of tea. And besides, I told the jury to shut up this afternoon, so we’ll need all the close decisions.”

“Who’s tryin’ this case?” demanded Phœbe. “The charge is gallivantin’ with malice aforethought.”

“Gallivanting with intent to kill,” agreed Jawn. “We plead guilty.”

“Is this your first offence?” asked the “judge.”

“Good Lord!” ejaculated Jawn. “It’s my seventy-seventh! Do you take me for a fledgling? I’ve got records to prove it. My dear lady, I shaved when I was eleven.”

“May it please the Court,” Richard spoke with the gravest deference, and told of the passions of Jawn as illustrated in his forthcoming book, “Love Limericks of a Left-tenant.”

“Out with them, man; out with them!” demanded Phœbe.

“Some of them need expurgating badly,” warned Richard.

“The Court must be entertained,” said Phœbe, “even at the expense of a little vulgarity. Proceed, sir.”

“The saddest case,” Jawn searched his memory, “is that of a lady of my college days whose name I did not know, but who welcomed and nobly assisted my young aspirations; who, in short, taught me much.”

Then he recited the “epitaph” of the lass who caught his heart during the early weeks of his Freshmanhood, who led him on outrageously, who looked the part of an under-grad in the high school, but who turned out to be the wife of the Dean!

“These college professors will often fool you,” Jawn explained. “They marry the cutest little springers with the feathers still on their legs——”

“Don’t remind me of my Orpingtons!” cried Phœbe.

“—And with round little blushing peach-blow faces! It would fool anyone. You see, they are a shy lot alltheir young days, the professors are, the years when they should have been prancing about colt-like and finding out things. So they fly from the sight of women and sit in their cells and grow ogre-eyed and brainy. Then late in life they slide out in the twilight and grab a Young One. There ought to be a law against it.”

The charge of “gallivantin’” was amply proved, at least against Jawn, by his own series of poetic confessions.

“And you say you’ve already had seventy-seven affairs with the ladies!” Phœbe expressed her incredulity.

“He’s on his seventy-seventh now,” corrected Richard.

“H-m!” Phœbe eyed him. “It’s not me you’re after makin’ eyes at, is it?”

“I decline to commit myself,” said Jawn solemnly. “I appeal to the legal decency of the jury that a man can’t be compelled to bear testimony against himself.”

The jury shifted about uneasily. The jury was obviously disturbed. Like many unhappy persons on this earth, Walter understood everything in the situation but the humour of it, and so missed its very salt.

“The jury will please mind its own business,” the Court admonished; “I merely remind the prisoner that if he tries any gallivantin’ with this Court he’ll find himself muzzled and manacled in holy matrimony before he can think up a rhyme for ‘God-help-me.’ This Court finds the single state very depressing, and is gettin’ entirely too old to miss a chance. All of which reminds me, Jawn, that you must have begun early. Have you any early records?”

Richard laughed appreciatively. He knew what was coming.

“Oh, a very good record,” said Jawn. “It is the only one about whose ranking I feel positively sure. Icall it ‘My Firth,’ for I was entirely too young to speak plainly. The official account goes this way,

“To myself on the day of my birthI lisped, ‘What a charming young nurth!’And then when she faced meAnd frankly embraced me,I remarked, ‘Not tho bad, thith ol’ Earth!’”

“To myself on the day of my birthI lisped, ‘What a charming young nurth!’And then when she faced meAnd frankly embraced me,I remarked, ‘Not tho bad, thith ol’ Earth!’”

“To myself on the day of my birth

I lisped, ‘What a charming young nurth!’

And then when she faced me

And frankly embraced me,

I remarked, ‘Not tho bad, thith ol’ Earth!’”

“Oh, beautiful! beautiful!” Phœbe clapped her hands. “I could love you for that one, Jawn.”

“It is strikingly optimistic,” commented Richard. “‘Not tho bad, thith ol’ Earth!’ And it is absolutely characteristic of Jawn.”

“I can believe it!”—this from Phœbe. “He was an imp of a lad from the cradle!”

“Jawn’s the only specimen of pure lover left from the Middle Ages,” said Richard, “for he believes with Dante, Petrarch and the rest that true love dies with marriage.”

“Devil a bit!” Jawn remonstrated. “There’s often a fine spark of it left——”

“For some other fellow,” Phœbe broke in quickly. “My own thought, exactly!” he added, and joined with Phœbe in good hearty Irish laughter.

“Order!” suddenly cried the Court, pounding her tea-cup on the table. “What d’ye mean by gettin’ the Court to commit herself like that!”

After much more such give and take the Court arraigned the prisoners and charged the jury. She acknowledged that the evidence was all against them from the start, but that long acquaintance with a criminal world had made her soft; besides, they had drunk her tea and had laughed at her jokes, and no Irishman could ever hang a man he had once laughed with. So she would recommend them to the mercy of the jury.

The jury was absolutely non-committal. Whether it was surly, sleepy or speechless no one could say.

“Wan’ ’o see you alone,” it muttered to Phœbe; and nothing else would it admit.

“The jury can’t come to a unanimous verdict,” the Court announced; “so if the prisoners will kindly run out and play, we’ll reason with the obstinate members.”

“What’s the trouble, boy?” she asked when they were alone.

In semi-incoherent language he poured forth his feelings about the two men whose cleverness with words had been hoodwinking everybody. With her mind alert to sift out all the evidence he could produce, she presented a laughing mocking face. But she could not joke him out of his convictions.

The “card,” which he always carried about with him, was produced and partially explained. Richard’s latest version, for some occult reason of his own, Walter did not tell.

“Glory be!” ejaculated Phœbe as she read the name. “The villain! Why, this man is dead; I read about it in the papers several years ago; he went down with his whole family in a shipwreck. What do you think it means, boy?”

“Dunno.”

“Well,” she assumed a cheerful tone, “perhaps it is only a lark. They are a great pair of boys. They would not stop at anything.” The memory of their skylarking came back to brighten her face. “I haven’t had such a good laugh since—since Seth got into the paint house.”

She hummed about her little dining-room, putting away the tea-things, and considered the meaning of Mr. Richard’s assumption of the name of a dead man.Some years ago a sleek-looking chap with no obvious occupation had rented a house on Main Street, made the acquaintance of important citizens and had continued for months to be unnaturally Christian. Everyone in the village had made a guess as to the exact sort of swindle he would eventually introduce, so that when he finally began to talk rubber trees in Madagascar the laugh was so hearty and universal that he left without offering to let anybody in on the ground floor.

Would it be rubber trees in Madagascar, or just a plain case of “worthless cheque”? Or would it be “power of attorney” with one or the other of them getting the “heiress”? Phœbe hoped it would be the latter. “I’ve handled a lunatic,” she said to herself, “which makes me hanker after the intelligent even if they be criminal.”

“Well, we’ll keep our eyes open, boy,” said Phœbe; “but whatever you do don’t let on you suspect anything. Meet a confidence man with confidence. You’ll spoil everything if you go about like you were this afternoon lookin’ as glum as cold beeswax. Didn’t you see how I was jollyin’ ’em along? Did you think I meant half what I said? Of course I didn’t. It was to make them feel easy. The devil was never yet fooled by a pious face.”

Phœbe understood Walter better than anyone else. This theory of her hilarious enjoyment filled him with peace and sent him home with his head in the air.

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