d boa-constrictors, shuddering all the while because
the barriers between them are so weak. Although the little old man's
back was bent like a day-laborer's, it was easy to see that he must
formerly have been of medium height. His excessive thinness, the
slenderness of his limbs, proved that he had always been of slight
build. He wore black silk breeches which hung about his fleshless thighs
in folds, like a lowered veil. An anatomist would instinctively have
recognized the symptoms of consumption in its advanced stages, at sight
of the tiny legs which served to support that strange frame. You would
have said that they were a pair of cross-bones on a gravestone. A
feeling of profound horror seized the heart when a close scrutiny
revealed the marks made by decrepitude upon that frail machine.

He wore a white waistcoat embroidered with gold, in the old style, and
his linen was of dazzling whiteness. A shirt-frill of English lace,
yellow with age, the magnificence of which a queen might have envied,
formed a series of yellow ruffles on his breast; but upon him the lace
seemed rather a worthless rag than an ornament. In the centre of
the frill a diamond of inestimable value gleamed like a sun. That
superannuated splendor, that display of treasure, of great intrinsic
worth, but utterly without taste, served to bring out in still bolder
relief the strange creature's face. The frame was worthy of the
portrait. That dark face was full of angles and furrowed deep in every
direction; the chin was furrowed; there were great hollows at the
temples; the eyes were sunken in yellow orbits. The maxillary bones,
which his indescribable gauntness caused to protrude, formed deep
cavities in the centre of both cheeks. These protuberances, as the
light fell upon them, caused curious effects of light and shadow which
deprived that face of its last vestige of resemblance to the human
countenance. And then, too, the lapse of years had drawn the fine,
yellow skin so close to the bones that it described a multitude of
wrinkles everywhere, either circular like the ripples in the water
caused by a stone which a child throws in, or star-shaped like a pane of
glass cracked by a blow; but everywhere very deep, and as close together
as the leaves of a closed book. We often see more hideous old men; but
what contributed more than aught else to give to the spectre that rose
before us the aspect of an artificial creation was the red and white
paint with