f his family appear shorn of that important feature. The
plebeian nose, so long as it is neither pug nor pig, is safer, better.
Men are not afraid of it. Syndicates and boards breathe more freely
when the barriers of nose are broken down, and a good mediocrity of
feature may yet avert a war or preserve a treaty. At all events, a
study of our chief contemporaries will bear out a considerable portion
of this reasoning. The beauties of society and the stage have a
leaning to noses tiptilted like the petals of a flower, or to a nose
which is a kind of modification of the Greek, frequently found among
Americans. For instance, in Canada there is fast growing up a new type
of head, clean-shaven, firm, expressionless young faces, who bring
their thick, straight dark hair and blue-grey eyes from the country to
the town. They are forsaking the plough and the roadside school for
the warehouse and the pestle and mortar. It is not openly reported of
such that they would rather wear a black coat and starve than wear
fustian and do well, to quote Thomas Hardy, but the stress of things
drives them. The rural communities are dull; amusements are lacking;
there seems nothing to live for outside work. Nature poets and
wild-animal delineators are not among these set, earnest,
straight-featured faces. The former are more likely to be denizens of
cities. In this slightly dour Canadian face there are but few aquiline
noses, and yet such is the danger of generalizing that perhaps the
first people readers of this page meet after perusing it might be a
group of students, none with Celtic hair and eyes and all with Roman
contours. Likewise, on opening the current number of a leading musical
journal, the long, high, prominent nasal organ of Sir Edward Elgar
confronts us, whose peculiar cast of thought confirms the impression
that spirituality, fine artistic conception and capacity to achieve are
still the dower of those possessing this fast-disappearing feature.
Ringfield belonged to the tribe of straight-nosed, grey-eyed
thinkers--a finished contrast to Father Rielle, whose worn profile
suggested the wormwood and the gall. Looks, however, not being in all
cases indications of the character within, the priest was an
exceedingly simple and earnest man, constitutionally timid, and
physically frail; thus, he passed for what is known as a "deep" man,
when he was nothing of the sort, and although it may be a mooted point
whether in a Cathol