ked nose
neatly washed till it shone like the pewter handle of a knife, his
pointed cranium but sparsely furnished with lanky black hair peeping out
above the bandage like a yellow wurzel in wrappings of paper. His arms
and legs were unusually long and unusually thin, and he had long lean
hands and long narrow feet, but his body was short and slightly bent
forward as if under the weight of his head, which also was narrow and
long. His neck was like that of a stork that has been half-plucked, it
rose from out the centre of his ruffled collar with a curious undulating
movement, which suggested that he could turn it right round and look at
the middle of his own back. He wore a brown doublet of duffle and brown
trunks and hose, and boots that appeared to be too big even for his huge
feet.

Beside him Pythagoras looked like the full stop in a semi-colon, for he
was but little over five feet in height and very fat. His doublet of
thick green cloth had long ago burst its buttons across his protuberent
chest. His face, which was round as a full moon, was highly coloured
even to the tip of his small upturned nose, and his forehead, crowned by
a thick mass of red-brown hair which fell in heavy and lanky waves down
to his eyebrows, was always wet and shiny. He had a habit of standing
with legs wide apart, his abdomen thrust forward and his small podgy
hands resting upon it. His eyes were very small and blinked incessantly.
Below his double chin he wore a huge bow of starched white linen, which
at this moment was sadly crumpled and stained, and his collar which also
had seen more prosperous days was held together by a piece of string.

Like his friend Socrates, his trunk and hose were of worsted, and he
wore high leather boots which reached well above the knee and looked to
have been intended for a much taller person. The hat, with the tall
sugar-loaf crown, which he had picked up after the fray in the Dam
Straat, was much too small for his big round head. He tried, before the
mirror, to adjust it at a becoming angle.

In strange contrast to these two worthies was their friend whom they
called Diogenes. He himself, had you questioned him ever so closely,
could not have told you from what ancestry or what unknown parent had
come to him that air of swagger and of assurance which his avowed penury
had never the power to subdue. Tall above the average, powerfully built
and solidly planted on firm limbs he looked what he easily might