with tranquil satisfaction. I could
not have enjoyed my pet vice more if my gentle tormentor had been a
smoker herself, and an advocate of the practice. Well, the sight of her
handwriting reminded me that I way getting very hungry to see her again.
I easily guessed what I should find in her letter. I opened it. Good!
just as I expected; she was coming! Coming this very day, too, and by
the morning train; I might expect her any moment.

I said to myself, "I am thoroughly happy and content now. If my most
pitiless enemy could appear before me at this moment, I would freely
right any wrong I may have done him."

Straightway the door opened, and a shriveled, shabby dwarf entered. He
was not more than two feet high. He seemed to be about forty years old.
Every feature and every inch of him was a trifle out of shape; and so,
while one could not put his finger upon any particular part and say,
"This is a conspicuous deformity," the spectator perceived that this
little person was a deformity as a whole--a vague, general, evenly
blended, nicely adjusted deformity. There was a fox-like cunning in the
face and the sharp little eyes, and also alertness and malice. And
yet, this vile bit of human rubbish seemed to bear a sort of remote
and ill-defined resemblance to me! It was dully perceptible in the
mean form, the countenance, and even the clothes, gestures, manner,
and attitudes of the creature. He was a farfetched, dim suggestion of
a burlesque upon me, a caricature of me in little. One thing about him
struck me forcibly and most unpleasantly: he was covered all over with
a fuzzy, greenish mold, such as one sometimes sees upon mildewed bread.
The sight of it was nauseating.

He stepped along with a chipper air, and flung himself into a doll's
chair in a very free-and-easy way, without waiting to be asked. He
tossed his hat into the waste-basket. He picked up my old chalk pipe
from the floor, gave the stem a wipe or two on his knee, filled the
bowl from the tobacco-box at his side, and said to me in a tone of pert
command:

"Gimme a match!"

I blushed to the roots of my hair; partly with indignation, but mainly
because it somehow seemed to me that this whole performance was very
like an exaggeration of conduct which I myself had sometimes been
guilty of in my intercourse with familiar friends--but never, never with
strangers, I observed to myself. I wanted to kick the pygmy into the
fire, but some incomprehensible sense of