The entire unknown race of Man was hideous. So coarse in feature--their noses were thick, half an inch thick, or enormously long and knobbed at the end like a walking-stick, or curved like a reaping-hook, or slewed to one side, or flat as if they had been smashed, or short and stumpy and incomplete, or spotted with red blotches, or turned up in the vulgarest manner--nobody had a good nose. Their eyes were goggles, round and staring--like liquid marbles--they had no eyelashes, and their eyebrows were either white and invisible, or shaggy, as if thistles grew along their foreheads. Their cheeks were speckled and freckled and red and brick-dust and leather-coloured, and enclosed with scrubby whiskers, like a garden hedge. Upon the whole, those who shaved and were smooth looked worse than those who did not, for they thus exposed the angularities of their chins and jaws. They wore such horrid hats on the top of these roughly-sketched faces--sketched, as it were, with a bit of burnt stick. Some of them had their hats on the backs of their heads, and some wore them aslant, and some jammed over their brows. They went along smoking and puffing, and talking and guffawing in the vulgarest way, _en route_ to swill and smoke and puff and guffaw somewhere else. Whoever could tell what they were talking about? these creatures. They had no form or grace like a woman--no lovely sloped shoulders, no beautiful bosom, no sweeping curve of robe down to the feet. No softness of cheek, or silky hair, or complexion, or taper fingers, or arched eyebrows; no sort of style whatever. They were mere wooden figures; and, in short, sublimely ugly. There was a good deal of truth in Amaryllis' reflections; it was a pity a woman was not taken into confidence when the men were made. Suppose the women were like the men, and we had to make love to such a set of bristly, grisly wretches!--pah! shouldn't we think them ugly! The patience of the women, putting up with us so long! As for the muscles on which we pride ourselves so much, in a woman's eyes (though she prefers a strong man) they simply increase our extraordinary ugliness. But if we look pale, and slim, and so forth, then they despise us, and there is no doubt that altogether the men were made wrong. "And Jack's the very ugliest of the lot," thought Amaryllis. "He just _is_ ugly." Pounding up the slope, big John Duck came by-and-by to the gateway, and entering without ceremony, as is the custom in the country, found Mr. Iden near the back door talking to a farmer who had seated himself on a stool. He was a middle-aged man, stout and florid, rough as a chunk of wood, but dressed in his best brown for the fair. Tears were rolling down his vast round cheeks as he expatiated on his grievances to Mr. Iden:--