d the Koh-i-noor's face turned so white with rage,
that his blue-black moustache and beard looked fearful, seen against it.
He grinned with wrath, and caught at a tumbler, as if he would have
thrown it or its contents at the speaker. The young Marylander fixed his
clear, steady eye upon him, and laid his hand on his arm, carelessly
almost, but the Jewel found it was held so that he could not move it. It
was of no use. The youth was his master in muscle, and in that deadly
Indian hug in which men wrestle with their eyes;--over in five seconds,
but breaks one of their two backs, and is good for threescore years and
ten;--one trial enough,--settles the whole matter,--just as when two
feathered songsters of the barnyard, game and dunghill, come
together,-after a jump or two at each other, and a few sharp kicks, there
is the end of it; and it is, Apres vous, Monsieur, with the beaten party
in all the social relations for all the rest of his days.

I cannot philosophically account for the Koh-i-noor's wrath. For though
a cosmetic is sold, bearing the name of the lady to whom reference was
made by the young person John, yet, as it is publicly asserted in
respectable prints that this cosmetic is not a dye, I see no reason why
he should have felt offended by any suggestion that he was indebted to it
or its authoress.

I have no doubt that there are certain exceptional complexions to which
the purple tinge, above alluded to, is natural. Nature is fertile in
variety. I saw an albiness in London once, for sixpence, (including the
inspection of a stuffed boa-constrictor,) who looked as if she had been
boiled in milk. A young Hottentot of my acquaintance had his hair all in
little pellets of the size of marrow-fat peas. One of my own classmates
has undergone a singular change of late years,--his hair losing its
original tint, and getting a remarkable discolored look; and another has
ceased to cultivate any hair at all over the vertex or crown of the head.
So I am perfectly willing to believe that the purple-black of the
Koh-i-noor's moustache and whiskers is constitutional and not pigmentary.
But I can't think why he got so angry.

The intelligent reader will understand that all this pantomime of the
threatened onslaught and its suppression passed so quickly that it was
all over by the time the other end of the table found out there was a
disturbance; just as a man chopping wood half a mile off may be seen
resting on his ax