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Show 71 with a black felt hat upside down in his lap and a small wooden table with the plates on it within easy reach. The plates were battered at the corners and badly scratched and grooved. The rings that bound them together in an irregular stack were twisted and bent, so that turning a plate over required both hands to jockey the margins without pulling the holes larger, since the metal was thin and soft. Little streams of dirt ran out onto the table whenever he turned a plate, and dried insects and leaves and even twigs with dessicated buds turned up every few plates. Oliver cleared his throat on the other side of the blanket. Lorin looked around to make sure the farm children hadn't crept back in to see what they were doing and then bent over, putting his face in the hat and drawing the sides close to his cheekbones with one hand and, as far as he could, his knees, to cut out what light was left in the room. With his other hand he felt for the plate that was open on the table and laid his palm across it, feeling the burr along the edges of the characters with his fingertips. Sweat trickled down through his hair and onto his thumb inside the hat. It was dark inside the hat, and stuffy, and smelled of someone else's head. The stone in the bottom of the hat glowed faintly, brightening or fading as he moved his hand one way or the other across the plate. When he had it right the glow, though still soft, was bright enough that he was able to see the shiny sides of his nose and the oily stains on the inside of the crown. With patience he could make out the figure at the center of the glow-a numeral 3 connected to a fishbowl with four upright candles, each with a dot under it-with the word "accomplish" printed in square letters beneath the figure. "Accomplish," he said. "What?" said Oliver from the other side of the blanket. |