His person coincided singularly well with the description of the fictitious recluse. He had been deformed and horrible since his birth in no ordinary degree, which was probably the cause of the analogous peculiarities of his temper. His countenance, of the darkest of dark complexions, was half covered with a long grisly black beard, and bore, as the centre of its system of terrors, two eyes of piercing black, which were sometimes, in his excited moments, lighted up with wild and supernatural lustre. His head was of a singular shape, conical and oblong, and might now form no unworthy subject for the studies of the Phrenological Society. To speak in their language, he must have had few of the moral or intellectual faculties developed in any perfection; for his brow retreated immediately above the eyebrows, and threw nearly the whole of his head, which was large, behind the ear, where, it is said, the meaner organs of the brain are situated—giving immense scope to cruelty, obstinacy, self-esteem, etc. His nose was long and aquiline; his mouth wide and contemptuously curled upward; and his chin protruded from the visage in a long grisly peak. His body, short and muscular, was thicker than that of most ordinary men, and, with his arms, which were long and of great power, might have formed the parts of a giant, had not nature capriciously curtailed his form of other limbs conformable to these proportions. His arms had the same defect with those of the celebrated Betterton, and he could not lift them higher than his breast; yet such was their strength, that he has been known to tear up a tree by the roots, which had baffled the united efforts of two labourers, who had striven by digging to eradicate it. His legs were short, fin-like, and bent outwards, with feet totally inapplicable to the common purposes of walking. These he constantly endeavoured to conceal from sight by wrapping them up in immense masses of rags. This ungainly part of his figure is remarkable as the only one which differs materially from the description of “Cannie Elshie,” whose “body, thick and square, was mounted upon two large feet.”