d her strength has been exhausted by some great and noble
effort."

Mr. Storm uttered these extraordinary sentiments, not with a careless
toss of the head, and loud demonstrative ardor, but with a grave,
measured intonation, as if he were reciting from some tedious moral
book recommended by ministers of the gospel and fathers of families.
His long, dry face, with its perpendicular wrinkles, and the whole
absurd proportion between his longitude and latitude, suggested to me
the idea that Nature had originally made him short and stout, and
then, having suddenly changed her mind, had subjected him to a
prolonged process of stretching in order to adapt him to the altered
type. I had no doubt that if I could see those parts of his body which
were now covered, they would show by longitudinal wrinkles the effects
of this hypothetical stretching. His features in their original shape
may have been handsome, although I am inclined to doubt it; there were
glimpses of fine intentions in them, but, as a whole, he was right in
pronouncing them rather a second-rate piece of workmanship. His nose
was thin, sharp, and aquiline, and the bone seemed to exert a severe
strain upon the epidermis, which was stretched over the projecting
bridge with the tensity of a drum-head. I will not reveal what an
unpleasant possibility this niggardliness on Nature's part suggested
to me. His eyes (the only feature in him which was distinctly Norse)
were of a warm gray tint, and expressed frank severity. You saw at
once that, whatever his eccentricities might be, here was a Norseman
in whom there was no guile. It was these fine Norse eyes which at once
prepossessed me in Storm's favor. They furnished me approximately with
the key-note to his character; I knew that God did not expend such
eyes upon any but the rarest natures. Storm's taste for old furniture
was no longer a mystery; in fact, I began to suspect that there lurked
a fantastic streak of some warm, deep-tinged hue somewhere in his bony
composition, and my fingers began to itch with the desire to make a
psychological autopsy.

"Apropos of crude workmanship," began my host after a pause, during
which he had been examining his long fingers with an air of criticism
and doubtful approbation. "You know why I wrote to you?"

I confessed that I was unable to guess his motive.

"Well, then, listen to me. Your article was written with a good deal
of youthful power; but it was thoroughly false. You spo