ages, which I had now a better opportunity
of examining than while on the road. There seemed every description of
guilt, and every degree of religious feeling, mingled together in the
same mass, and all more or less subdued by the same principle of abrupt
and gloomy abstraction.

There was a little man dressed in a turned black coat, and drab
cassimere small-clothes, who struck me as a remarkable figure; his back
was long, his legs and thighs short and he walked on the edge of his
feet. He had a pale, sorrowful face, with bags hung under his eyes,
drooping eyelids, no beard, no brows, and no chin; for in the place of
the two latter, there was a slight frown where the brows ought to have
been, and a curve in the place of the chin, merely perceptible from the
bottom of his underlip to his throat. He wore his own hair, which was a
light bay, so that you could scarcely distinguish it from a wig. I was
given to understand that he was a religious tailor under three blessed
orders.

There was another round-shouldered man, with black, twinkling eyes,
plump face, rosy cheeks, and nose twisted at the top. In his character,
humor appeared to be the predominant principle. He was evidently an
original, and, I am sure, had the knack of turning the ludicrous side
of every object towards him. His eye would roll about from one person to
another while fingering his beads, with an expression of humor something
like delight beaming from his fixed, steady countenance; and when
anything that would have been particularly worthy of a joke met his
glance, I could perceive a tremulous twinkle of the eye intimating his
inward enjoyment. I think still this jocular abstinence was to him the
severest part of the pilgrimage. I asked him was he ever at the "Island"
before; he peered into my face with a look that infected me with
risibility, without knowing why, shrugged up his shoulders, looked into
the fire, and said "No," with a dry emphatic cough after it--as much as
to say, you may apply my answer to the future as well as to the past.
Religion, I thought, was giving him up, or sent him here as a last
resource. He spoke to nobody.

A little behind the humorist sat a very tall, thin, important-looking
personage, dressed in a shabby black coat; there was a cast of severity
and self-sufficiency in his face, which at once indicated him to be
a man of office and authority, little accustomed to have his own
will disputed. I was not wrong in my conject