nderfully expressive
of a gnawing sorrow, never to be relieved. You would almost have
thought it the face of some abbess, for some unspeakable crime
voluntarily sequestered from human society, and leading a life of
agonised penitence without hope; so marvellously sad and tearfully
pitiable was this head. But when you first beheld it, no such emotions
ever crossed your mind. All your eyes and all your horrified soul were
fast fascinated and frozen by the sight of a hideous, crumpled horn,
like that of a ram, downward growing out from the forehead, and partly
shadowing the face; but as you gazed, the freezing fascination of its
horribleness gradually waned, and then your whole heart burst with
sorrow, as you contemplated those aged features, ashy pale and wan. The
horn seemed the mark of a curse for some mysterious sin, conceived and
committed before the spirit had entered the flesh. Yet that sin seemed
something imposed, and not voluntarily sought; some sin growing out of
the heartless necessities of the predestination of things; some sin
under which the sinner sank in sinless woe.

But no pang of pain, not the slightest touch of concern, ever crossed
the bosom of Cuticle when he looked on this cast. It was immovably
fixed to a bracket, against the partition of his state-room, so that it
was the first object that greeted his eyes when he opened them from his
nightly sleep. Nor was it to hide the face, that upon retiring, he
always hung his Navy cap upon the upward curling extremity of the horn,
for that obscured it but little.

The Surgeon's cot-boy, the lad who made up his swinging bed and took
care of his room, often told us of the horror he sometimes felt when he
would find himself alone in ins master's retreat. At times he was
seized with the idea that Cuticle was a preternatural being; and once
entering his room in the middle watch of the night, he started at
finding it enveloped in a thick, bluish vapour, and stifling with the
odours of brimstone. Upon hearing a low groan from the smoke, with a
wild cry he darted from the place, and, rousing the occupants of the
neighbouring state-rooms, it was found that the vapour proceeded from
smouldering bunches of lucifer matches, which had become ignited
through the carelessness of the Surgeon. Cuticle, almost dead, was
dragged from the suffocating atmosphere, and it was several days ere he
completely recovered from its effects. This accident took place
immediately over th