voices.

My friend cleared his throat, put his hair behind his ears, and with
a grave, smooth face, but with a merry twinkle in his shrewd gray eye,
began as follows:

"Jedwort I said his name was; and I shall never forget how he looked one
particular morning. He stood leaning on the front gate--or rather on the
post, for the gate itself was such a shackling concern a child couldn't
have leaned on't without breaking it down. And Jedwort was no child.
Think of a stoutish, stooping, duck-legged man, with a mountainous back,
strongly suggestive of a bag of grist under his shirt, and you have him.
That imaginary grist had been growing heavier and heavier, and he more
and more bent under it, for the last fifteen years and more, until his
head and neck just came forward out from between his shoulders like
a turtle's from its shell. His arms hung, as he walked, almost to the
ground. Being curved with the elbows outward, he looked for all the
world, in a front view, like a waddling interrogation-point inclosed
in a parenthesis. If man was ever a quadruped, as I've heard some folks
tell, and rose gradually from four legs to two, there must have been a
time, very early in his history, when he went about like Old Jedwort.

"The gate had been a very good gate in its day. It had even been a
genteel gate when Jedwort came into possession of the place by marrying
his wife, who inherited it from her uncle. That was some twenty years
before, and everything had been going to rack and ruin ever since.

"Jedwort himself had been going to rack and ruin, morally speaking. He
was a middling decent sort of man when I first knew him; and I judge
there must have been something about him more than common, or he
never could have got such a wife. But then women do marry, sometimes,
unaccountably. I've known downright ugly and disagreeable fellows to
work around, till by and by they would get a pretty girl fascinated by
something in them which nobody else could see, and then marry her in
spite of everything;--just as you may have seen a magnetizer on the
stage make his subjects do just what he pleased, or a black snake charm
a bird. Talk about women marrying with their eyes open, under such
circumstances! They don't marry with their eyes open: they are put to
sleep, in one sense, and a'n't more than half responsible for what they
do, if they are that. Then rises the question that has puzzled wiser
heads than any of ours here, and will puzzle more