flourish from the dredging-box. He was erect of
carriage, and of a prompt, ridiculous alertness of step and motion,
very much like that of Major Wellington De Boots. And his face
commonly wore a kind of complacent serenity such as the Hindoos
ascribe to Buddha. I know a little snappish dentist's-goods dealer up
town, who might be mistaken for Hicok-alorum any day.

Well, well--what had the doctor done? Why--it will sound absurd,
probably, to some unbelieving people--but really Dr. Hicok confessed
the whole story to me himself: he had made a bargain with the Evil
One! And indeed he was such an uncommonly disagreeable-looking fellow,
that, unless on some such hypothesis, it is impossible to imagine how
he could have prospered as he did. He gained patients, and cured them
too; made money; invested successfully; bought a brown-stone front--a
house, not a wiglet--then bought other real estate; began to put his
name on charity subscription lists, and to be made vice-president of
various things.

Chiefest of all,--it must have been by some superhuman aid that Dr.
Hicok married his wife, the then and present Mrs. Hicok. Dear me! I
have described the doctor easily enough. But how infinitely more
difficult it is to delineate Beauty than the Beast: did you ever think
of it? All I can say is, that she is a very lovely woman now; and she
must have been, when the doctor married her, one of the loveliest
creatures that ever lived--a lively, graceful, bright-eyed brunette,
with thick fine long black hair, pencilled delicate eyebrows, little
pink ears, thin high nose, great astonished brown eyes, perfect
teeth, a little rosebud of a mouth, and a figure so extremely
beautiful that nobody believed she did not pad--hardly even the
artists who--those of them at least who work faithfully in the
life-school--are the very best judges extant of truth in costume and
personal beauty. But, furthermore, she was good, with the innocent
unconscious goodness of a sweet little child; and of all feminine
charms--even beyond her supreme grace of motion--she possessed the
sweetest, the most resistless--a lovely voice; whose tones, whether in
speech or song, were perfect in sweetness, and with a strange
penetrating sympathetic quality and at the same time with the most
wonderful half-delaying completeness of articulation and modulation,
as if she enjoyed the sound of her own music. No doubt she did; but it
was unconsciously, like a bird. The voice was so