Delaware; or, The Ruined Family. Vol. 1 — John Shaqi
Delaware; or, The Ruined Family. Vol. 1James, G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford)
General
Delaware; or, The Ruined Family. Vol. 1
James, G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford)
Fiction
That tone, however, is not without its advantages also, and the young
sailor found that it might be serviceable, when at Hartford Bridge a
person of a very different description was intruded upon them. He was
a short, broad made man, with long baboonish arms, and a face on which
nature had so plainly written the class to which it was to belong,
that had fortune in some of her freaks covered it either with the
coronet of a peer, or a peasants straw hat, his mother, or fortune, or
nature, would have had much to answer for. Some of the features were
good, however--the eyes were very tolerable, for instance; and the
nose was not bad. But then the cheek-bones!--Good God, such
cheek-bones! From Crim Tartary to Banff there is nothing to be seen
like them. The mouth, too, was worse--one of those fearful mouths,
whose broad, fat, wide-parted, irregular lips, seem to vaticinate the
fate of the owner with such distinctness that no person of common
foresight can see them without at once picturing the person who
possesses them--not as about to be hanged, but as actually hanging.
The skin that was over all was of that reddish, coarse, mottled kind,
which puts one in mind of a gross strawberry; and although, as before
said, the eyes in themselves were _goodish_ blue, meaningless eyes
enough, yet the place where there should have grown eyelashes, being
alone furnished with a red knotty line in their room, gave them a
ferret-like sharpness, without which they would have signified nothing
at all.
This Worthy, "_passant à joints pieds_" as Madame de Sevigné calls it,
over all ceremonies, was inclined to make himself so much at his ease,
that Captain Delaware--disgusted and offended, yet without any
absolute pretext for anger--felt strongly inclined to quarrel with,
and eject from the window, a person who interrupted a pleasant
conversation to substitute vulgar impertinence in its place. Burrel,
on the contrary, with cool indifference, amused himself for a moment
or two with the other's vulgarity, and then trode him into silence by
contempt. He then calmly resumed the conversation with his first
companion, from which there was something in his tone and manner that
irresistibly excluded the other, who to revenge himself looked out of
the window, and, like my Uncle Toby, whistled _lillebullero_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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