I.

MR. RICKETTY.

Mr. Ricketty is composed of angles. From his high silk hat worn into
dulness, through his black frock coat worn into brightness, along each
leg of his broad-checked trowsers worn into rustiness, down into his
flat, multi-patched boots, he is a long series of unrelieved angles.

Tipped on the back of his head, but well down over it, he wears an
antique high hat, which has assumed that patient, resigned expression
occasionally to be observed in the face of some venerable mule, which,
having long and hopelessly struggled to free herself of a despicable
bondage, at last bows submissively to the inevitable and trudges bravely
on till she dies in her tracks.

Everything about Mr. Ricketty, indeed, appears to have an individual
expression. His heavily lined, indented brow comes out in a sharp angle
over his snappy black eyes, which, sunk far within their sockets, look
just like black beans in an elsewise empty eggshell.

His nose is sharp, thin, pendent, and exceedingly ample in its
proportions, and it comes inquiringly out from his face as if employed
by the rest of his features as a sort of picket sentinel.

It is that uncommonly knowing nose to which the prudent observer of Mr.
Ricketty would give his closest attention. He would look at the acute
interior angle which it formed at the eyes, and think it much too acute
to be pleasant and much too interior to be pretty. He would look at the
obtuse exterior angle which it formed on its bridge, and wonder how any
humane parent could have permitted such a development to grow before his
very eyes when by one quick and dexterous strike with a flat-iron it
might have been remedied. He would look at the angle of incidence made
by the sun's rays on one side of his nose and then at the angle of
reflection on the other, and find himself lost in amazement that
anything so thin could produce so dark a shadow.

[Illustration: MR. RICKETTY.]

It is a most uncomfortable nose. It had a way of hanging protectingly
over his heavy dark-brown mustache, which, in its turn, hangs
protectingly over his thin, wide lips, so as to make it disagreeably
certain that they can open and shut, laugh, snap, and sneer without any
one being the wiser.

Upon lines almost parallel with those of his nose, his sharp chin
extends out and down, fitting by means of another angle upon his long
neck, wherein his Adam's apple, like the corner of a cube, wanders up
and down at random.