observed about that time, a man had to give his whole mind. Whatever mind the two young Atkinses possessed, had evidently been wholly given, for the neck-ties were alarmingly perfect, and constituted, in fact, an incontestable triumph of mind over matter. In the solitude of their aspiring souls, the young men worshipped the memory of Lord Hawbury and Lord Charles Chawles, and moulded their whiskers after the style of whiskerage patronized by those eminent nobles. It mattered not that the vulgar rumor had crossed the Atlantic that Lord Hawbury, immediately on his return to his ancestral acres, had been clapped into limbo by a low British tradesman, on account of certain pounds, shillings and pence owed by him the said Hawbury to him the said low tradesman. It mattered not that the still vulgarer rumor had crossed the Atlantic that Lord Charles Chawles, that bright, consummate flower of the British aristocracy, who had deigned to honor our humble homes with his august presence, had got into a row in a theatre just after his return to London—had, in the coarse language of the London newspapers, which love to hawk at merit, got drunk; cruelly insulted a poor ballet-dancer behind the scenes; cruelly beat and trod upon the manager, who had ventured a remonstrance; had thereupon been borne away, roaring and fighting, to the nearest station-house, from whence he had emerged in the morning, to incur the reprimand of a magistrate, and pay a brawler’s fine. What mattered such reports as these? mere evidence of the rush and outbreak of a fiery mind of general assault, as Horatio felicitously said, quoting from Hamlet, when the rumor reached him. Whiskers were whiskers still, and so Horatio trimmed the sandy crop which was his own, after the Hawbury model. The result was a scraggy mutton-chop, depending big end down, in tawny, straggling moss of hair from Horatio’s cheeks, and between these manly hirsute ornaments loomed a bald, flat, tallowy, superficial face, with an air of sullen emptiness upon it; with short brown hair, parted behind, and on the side, and brushed forward around it; with a low, broad forehead; dull, boiled blue eyes; a strong, short nose; a thin, lineless, resolute mouth; and a great expanse of chin and jaw, bolder than, but like, his younger sister’s. Mighty in whiskerage and hair, and on the Lord Charles Chawles model, was Horatio’s brother Thomas. Hair, tawny-brown in color, parted on the left, sloping up and off crescendo to fall in a mass on the right side, and bunching off in a round, full tuft of lesser quantity on the other side. This, as the lob-sided crown of a puffy face, with the younger sister’s chin and jaw. Eyes, close together, hard, black and insolent; short nose, a compromise between snub and straight, with a lift in the nostrils, as if it snuffed offence; mouth, a short, stern, small horseshoe curve, cusps down; and under this, on the broad and long flat chin, a tawny short imperial, and over this,