to be a barrack-room.

[Illustration: 2-00053]

As I lay thus pondering, the door cautiously opened, and a figure
appeared, which, as I had abundant leisure to examine it, and as the
individual is one who occasionally turns up in the course of my history,
I may as well take the present opportunity of presenting to my reader.
The man who entered, scarcely more than four feet and a half high, might
be about sixty years of age. His head, enormously disproportioned to
the rest of his figure, presented a number of flat surfaces, as though
nature had originally destined it for a crystal. Upon one of these
planes the eyes were set; and although as far apart as possible, yet
upon such terms of distance were they, that they never, even by an
accident, looked in the same direction. The nose was short and snubby;
the nostrils wide and expanded, as if the feature had been pitched
against the face in a moment of ill-temper, and flattened by the
force. As for the mouth, it looked like the malicious gash of a blunt
instrument, jagged, ragged, and uneven. It had not even the common-place
advantage of being parallel to the horizon, but ran in an oblique
direction from right to left, enclosed between a parenthesis of the
crankiest wrinkles that ever human cheek were creased by. The head would
have been bald but for a scanty wig, technically called a "jasy," which,
shrunk by time, now merely occupied the apex of the scalp, where it
moved about with every action of the forehead and eyebrows, and was
thus made to minister to the expression of a hundred emotions that other
men's wigs know nothing about. Truly, it was the strangest peruke that
ever covered a human cranium. I do not believe that another like it
ever existed. It had nothing in common with other wigs. It was like its
owner, perfectly _sui generis_. It had not the easy flow and wavy curl
of the old beau. It had not the methodical precision and rectilinear
propriety of the elderly gentleman. It was not full, like a lawyer's,
nor horse-shoed, like a bishop's. No. It was a cross-grained,
ill-tempered, ill-conditioned old scratch, that looked like nothing
under heaven save the husk of a hedgehog.

The dress of this strange figure was a suit of very gorgeous light
brown livery, with orange facings, a green plush waistcoat and shorts,
frogged, flapped, and embroidered most lavishly with gold lace, silk
stockings, with shoes, whose enormous buckles covered nearly the entire
foot, an