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THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS
CHAPTER I
THE MAN WHO DIED
I RETURNED from the City about three o'clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life. I had been three months in the old country, and was fed up with it. If anyone had told me a year ago that I would have been feeling like that I should have laughed at him, but there was the fact. The weather made me liverish, the talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick, I couldn't get enough exercise, and the amusements of London seemed as flat as soda-water that has been standing in the sun. "Richard Hannay," I kept telling myself, "you have got into the wrong ditch, my friend, and you had better climb out."
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