s comfortably. The trouble lay in hard
drinking, with its resultant waste of time, infidelity to trust, and
impatience of application. Thin, haggard, duskily pallid, deeply
wrinkled at forty, his black eyes watery and set in baggy circles of a
dull brown, his lean dark hands shaky and dirty, his linen wrinkled and
buttonless, his clothing frayed and unbrushed, he was an impersonation
of failure. He had gone into the legislature with a desperate hope of
somehow finding money in it, and as yet he had discovered nothing more
than his beggarly three dollars a day, and he felt himself more than
ever a failure. No wonder that he wore an air of profound depression,
approaching to absolute wretchedness and threatening suicide.

He looked the more cast down by contrast with the successful Mr.
Pullwool, gaudily alight with satin and jewelry, and shining with
conceit. Pullwool, by the way, although a dandy (that is, such a dandy
as one sees in gambling-saloons and behind liquor-bars), was far from
being a thing of beauty. He was so obnoxiously gross and shapeless,
that it seemed as if he did it on purpose and to be irritating. His fat
head was big enough to make a dwarf of, hunchback and all. His mottled
cheeks were vast and pendulous to that degree that they inspired the
imaginative beholder with terror, as reminding him of avalanches and
landslides which might slip their hold at the slightest shock and
plunge downward in a path of destruction. One puffy eyelid drooped in a
sinister way; obviously that was the eye that the Devil had selected
for his own; he kept it well curtained for purposes of concealment.
Looking out of this peep-hole, the Satanic badger could see a short,
thick nose, and by leaning forward a little he could get a glimpse of a
broad chin of several stories. Another unpleasing feature was a full
set of false teeth, which grinned in a ravenous fashion that was truly
disquieting, as if they were capable of devouring the whole internal
revenue. Finally, this continent of physiognomy was diversified by a
gigantic hairy wart, which sprouted defiantly from the temple nearest
the game eye, as though Lucifer had accidentally poked one of his horns
through. Mr. Dicker, who was a sensitive, squeamish man (as drunkards
sometimes are, through bad digestion and shaky nerves), could hardly
endure the sight of this wart, and always wanted to ask Pullwool why he
didn't cut it off.

"What's the meaning of it all?" persisted th