it or Cherokee
for her situation,) any body would do. I was not at all particular; so I
began my own description.

It is amazing how little difference there is between man and man. A very
few touches judiciously applied, would make Roebuck into Wellington,
especially if Roebuck held the brush himself. Involuntarily I found my
height increasing, my _embonpoint_ diminishing, my eyes brightening, my
hair disporting in wavy ringlets over a majestic brow, till at the end
of the second page I was Theodore Fitzhedingham, twenty-five years of
age, with several grandfathers and grandmothers distinguished in history
before the Norman conquest, and a clear rent-roll of forty thousand
a-year. And yet, after all, it was my own individual self, Thomas Smith
Sneezum--not, perhaps, exactly as I was at that moment--but as I had
often and often fancied myself when I had gone through a course of
Thaddeus of Warsaws, and other chronicles of the brave and beautiful.
For, I confess, I was no wiser than other people, and it is well known
they have an amazing tendency to identify themselves with the characters
of the books they read, which perhaps accounts for the contempt that
Doctors' or Clergymen's wives in country villages entertain for any body
of the name of Snookes; and gives them so prodigious an opinion of their
own importance, that they wouldn't visit a stockbroker or flannel
manufacturer for the world. But there I was, stuck in the third page of
the second chapter--Theodore Fitzhedingham--blessed with all that
handsomeness, and rolling in all that money, and not able to move hand
or foot, or in short make the least progress towards the _denouement_ of
the story. For, with all my study, I could not manufacture a heroine out
of any of the girls around me. Miss Letitia Morgan had false teeth--I
found it quite impossible to make a heroine of _her_; and besides, I was
not even sure of the genuineness of the long curls at the side of her
face. For, you will observe, that the beautifying process I have
mentioned above; seems strictly confined to one's own particular case.
No lying and swopping, and altering and amending, would make those long
brown artificial incisors--you saw a roll of the gold wire every time
she laughed--into a row of pearls encased in a casket of ruby. That is
my description of white teeth in red lips, and I think it is far from
bad. Then Miss Sophia was immensely tall, and immensely thin; and in the
mornings when she