at I know. If I do not tell, this
narrative is so constituted that there will be no moral to it.

One who studies man in puppets (in which purpose lies the chief value of
this amusing species), must think that we are degenerating rapidly. The
puppet hero, for instance, is a changed being. We know what he was; but
now he takes shelter in his wits. His organs affect his destiny. Careless
of the fact that the hero's achievement is to conquer nature, he seems
rather to boast of his subservience to her.

Still, up to this day, the fixture of a nose upon the puppet-hero's
frontispiece has not been attempted. Some one does it at last. When the
alternative came: "No nose to the hero, no moral to the tale;" could
there be hesitation?

And I would warn our sentimentalists to admit the nose among the features
proper to heroes, otherwise the race will become extinct. There is
already an amount of dropping of the curtain that is positively
wearisome, even to extremely refined persons, in order to save him from
apparent misconduct. He will have to go altogether, unless we boldly
figure him as other men. Manifestly the moment his career as a fairy
prince was at end, he was on the high road to a nose. The beneficent
Power that discriminated for him having vanished utterly, he was, like a
bankrupt gentleman, obliged to do all the work for himself. This is
nothing more than the tendency of the generations downward from the
ideal.

The springs that moved Wilfrid upon the present occasion were simple. We
will strip him of his heroic trappings for one fleeting instant, and show
them.

Jumping briskly from a restless bed, his first act was to address his
features to the looking-glass: and he saw surely the most glorious sight
for a hero of the knightly age that could possibly have been offered. The
battle of the previous night was written there in one eloquent big lump,
which would have passed him current as hero from end to end of the land
in the great days of old. These are the tea-table days. His preference
was for the visage of Wilfrid Pole, which he saw not. At the aspect of
the fearful mask, this young man stared, and then cursed; and then, by an
odd transition, he was reminded, as by the force of a sudden gust, that
Emilia's hair was redolent of pipe-smoke.

His remark was, "I can't be seen in this state." His thought (a dim
reminiscence of poetical readings): "Ambrosial locks indeed!" A sad
irony, which told that much gold-lea