good
crimson ones they were.

Jonathan, despite his bald head, his diminutive stature, his ample
pot-belly, and ampler nose, was a man of fine feelings. Nature was
outraged when he became a barber. He most assuredly was never destined
by her to shave beards, and manufacture perukes for heads more
brainless, many of them, than his own blocks. He ought to have been a
professor of metaphysics or logic in some famous university, such
as Heidelburg, Gottingen, or Glasgow;--but why lament over cureless
evils? it is sufficient to say he is a barber, and there is an end of
the matter.

We must now return to Merton. His solitary walks on the opposite side
of the street had not even, from the first, escaped the scrutinizing
eyes of Mr. Hookey. No: he saw in the tall, pale, elegant, dark-haired
student the victim of deep sensibility. From seeing him, he wondered,
from wondering he loved him, from loving he adored him: he knew
at once he was no common man. Having perused Byron's _Manfred_, he
conceived him to be such another as that strange character; or he
might be a second Lara; or, more, he might be, nay he was, a glorious
genius, full of high imaginings. Little do we know what bright
thoughts passed through the mind of the enthusiastic Hookey. He cursed
his profession, which debarred him from the fellowship of such a man:
he cursed his nose, which stood between him and the object of his
adoration.

Day after day had Mr. Hookey noticed the accomplished, the
highly-gifted Merton; but it was only upon this particular morning
that the recognition was mutual. Merton, on turning his eyes by chance
from the ground, looked to the opposite side of the street, and there
beheld _a nose_. He then turned his eyes to the earth in his usual
meditative mood; but, reflecting that a nose without an owner was
rather a singular phenomenon, he looked a second time, and there,
behind the nose, he saw a man; it was Mr. Hookey himself.

This was the first time that the melancholy and intellectual student
reciprocated upon Hookey the attention which Hookey had hitherto
bestowed exclusively upon him. No more was the barber's "sweetness
wasted upon the desert air," but fell on one who knew how to
appreciate it to its fullest extent. Merton stood stock-still, and
gazed upon him with mute admiration. He was positively fascinated. The
nose operated upon him like the head of Medusa, and almost turned him
to stone. And Mr. Hookey was fascinated too. Mer