Poor MacIlhenny’s life was a tragedy, and yet it was played, to the very last act, to an accompaniment of jeers and laughter--not malicious, not bitter, but simple, thoughtless laughter. A description of his personal appearance might, I think, go a good way toward explaining the cause of that general laughter. Had he been simply ugly, all had been well--there’s nothing injurious in ugliness; it may even be a power. He was worse than that. In our English language there is a word that may have been created at the very moment of Sandy’s birth, for the express use of those wishing to describe him perfectly but briefly--that word is “grotesque.” He was tall, very tall, with a sudden, rounding droop of the shoulders that gave him the look of a button-hook or interrogation point, while his thickness through the body was about that of a choice, salt codfish. If he was furnished with the usual number of internal organs they must have been pressed like autumn leaves in a dictionary, or else he did not wear them all at one time; that’s how thin he was. Then he was the only tall man I ever saw pacing through life on bowed-legs. No, not knock-kneed! Sandy’s legs were bowed to a roundness that let one see, at a glance, just how a picture of certain portions of the landscape would look in a perfectly round frame. No man on earth could command respect while standing on a pair of legs like Sandy’s, unless they were concealed beneath the protecting petticoat of church or college. He had very high cheek-bones, across which the skin was drawn so tightly that they looked like a pair of unexpected knuckles. His chin was long and straight, without the slightest indentation or curve about it. His nose shared in the general lengthiness and was thin and pointed, while, owing to the narrowness of his entire structural plan, each small, greenish-blue eye turned inwardly and gazed with fixed resentment at the intervening bridge that seemed to be crowding them. And these cruelly crossed eyes made MacIlhenny a veritable joy to the street boys, who would follow him, performing warlike dances, and then rush before him and wait at street corners with ostentatiously crossed forefingers between which they gravely spat to avert the ill-luck his glance might put upon them. Poor man! In no limb, no feature had he been spared--so that the final touch of common, coarse ugliness was found in the shining baldness of the top of his head, and the little flounce of brick-red hair with which he seemed to be modestly trying to cover its startling nudity. With such a body to dwell in, one can hardly wonder that his mind should become distorted and develop only in one direction, as it were, and such a direction, for the ambition of MacIlhenny, this poor, cross-eyed, bowlegged Scotchman of the lower laboring class--this excellent cutter of stone, was to be the greatest _tragic-actor_ of his day!