"Here," said I, "come to this extremity of the room, and place yourself opposite the glass." He came, and placed himself accordingly. "Now walk straight down upon, the glass, keeping your eye fixed upon your reflected nose." "What nose? Which nose?" said Gingham, in a state of obvious alarm. "Do you mean the nose in my face?" "I mean your nose in the glass." He walked as I had directed. "Well, really," said Gingham, it's extraordinary; it's very curious. When I walk and look at my nose in the glass, it appears quite straight again--just as it ought to be, in the middle of my face." "That's just it," said I. "Then you walk sideways. Depend upon it, if you walked straight, your nose would appear crooked." He repeated the experiment again, and again, muttering to himself, "Very remarkable, very curious; quite a natural phenomenon." "Don't distress yourself about your nose," said I; "it is a good enough nose, in magnitude respectable, though not strictly rectilinear. Make yourself easy; and say, with Erasmus, 'Nihil me poenitet hugeous nasi.'" CHAPTER III. Where Gingham got his classical knowledge, I had not at this time ascertained. Certain it is, he was a very fair classic. But there was one dreadful drawback to his character, and, in a man of his gravity, a strange one: I mean his offensive, horrid practice of making most atrocious Latin puns. A pun in English he viewed with utter contempt. It stirred his bile. No English pun escaped his lips. But for a Latin pun, he scrupled not to lay under contribution even the first-rate Latin poets, Virgil, Ovid--nay, his favourite author, Horace; and if I, influenced by bad example, was weak enough, in an unguarded moment, to commit the same offence, he stole my puns, and made them again as his own.