hes its eyebrows,
then blinks, and finally yawns,--Ah--h! Thirty-two even, white teeth,
in perfect order; a great, red, healthy tongue, and a round, mellow
roar, the parting remonstrance of the sleepy god, taking flight for
the day. Thereupon a voice, fetched from some profounder source than
the back of the head,--

"Steward! bring me my--Oh! A land-lubber again, am I!"

Mr. Balder Helwyse now sits up in bed, his hair and beard,--which are
extraordinarily luxuriant, and will be treated at greater length
hereafter,--his hair and beard in the wildest confusion. He stares
about him with a pair of well-opened dark eyes, which contrast
strangely with his fair Northern complexion. Next comes a spasmodic
stretching of arms and legs, a whisking of bedclothes, and a solid
thump of two feet upon the floor. Another survey of the room, ending
with a deep breathing in of the fresh air and an appreciative smack of
the lips.

"O nose, eyes, ears, and all my other godlike senses and faculties!
what a sensation is this of Mother Earth at sunrise! Better, seems to
me, than ocean, beloved of my Scandinavian forefathers. Hear those
birds! look at those divine trees, and the tall moist grass round
them! By my head! living is a glorious business!--What, ho! slave,
empty me here that bath-tub, and then ring the bell."

The slave--a handsome, handy fellow, unusually docile, inseparable
from his master, whose life-long bondsman he was, and so much like him
in many ways (owing, perhaps, to the intimacy always subsisting
between the two), that he had more than once been confounded with
him,--this obedient menial--

No! not even for a moment will we mislead our reader. Are we not sworn
confidants? What is he to think, then, of this abrupt introduction,
unheralded, unexplained? Be it at once confessed that Mr. Helwyse
travelled unattended, that there was no slave or other person of any
kind in the room, and that this high-sounding order of his was a mere
ebullition of his peculiar humor.

He was a philosopher, and was in the habit of making many of his
tenets minister to his amusement, when in his more sportive and genial
moods. Not to exhaust his characteristics too early in the story, it
need only be observed here that he held body and soul distinct, and so
far antagonistic that one or the other must be master; furthermore,
that the soul's supremacy was the more desirable. Whether it were also
invariable and uncontested, there will be opp