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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: within whose hospitable walls we were to lodge? The date was
but five years old, but in that time the world had changed
for Silverado; like Palmyra in the desert, it had outlived
its people and its purpose; we camped, like Layard, amid
ruins, and these names spoke to us of prehistoric time. A
boot-jack, a pair of boots, a dog-hutch, and these bills of
Mr. Chapman's were the only speaking relics that we
disinterred from all that vast Silverado rubbish-heap; but
what would I not have given to unearth a letter, a pocket-
book, a diary, only a ledger, or a roll of names, to take me
back, in a more personal manner, to the past? It pleases me,
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