He is a little old-maidish about his age, which for the last twenty
years has not got a day more than fifty-four. Being as sensitive of his
veracity as the State is of its dignity, we would not, either by
implication or otherwise, lay an impeachment at his door, but rather
charge the discrepancy to that sin (a treacherous memory) the legal
gentry find so convenient for their purposes when they knock down their
own positions. McArthur stood five feet eight exactly, when young, but
age has made him lean of person, and somewhat bent. His face is long
and corrugated; his expression of countenance singularly serious. A
nose, neither aquiline nor Grecian, but large enough, and long enough,
and red enough at the end, to make both; a sharp and
curiously-projecting chin, that threatens a meeting, at no very distant
day, with his nasal organ; two small, watchful blue eyes deep-set under
narrow arches, fringed with long gray lashes; a deeply-furrowed, but
straight and contracted forehead, and a shaggy red wig, poised upon the
crown of his head, and, reader, if you except the constant working of a
heavy, drooping lower lip, and the diagonal sight with which his eyes
are favored, you have his most prominent features. Fashion he holds in
utter contempt, nor has he the very best opinion in the world of our
fashionable tailors, who are grown so rich that they hold mortgages on
the very best plantations in the State, and offer themselves candidates
for the Governorship. Indeed, Mr. McArthur says, one of these knights
of the goose, not long since, had the pertinacity to imagine himself a
great General. And to show his tenacious adherence to the examples set
by the State, he dresses exactly as his grandfather’s great-grandfather
used to, in a blue coat, with small brass buttons, a narrow crimpy
collar, and tails long enough and sharp enough for a clipper-ship’s
run. The periods when he provided himself with new suits are so far
apart that they formed special episodes in his history; nevertheless
there is always an air of neatness about him, and he will spend much
time arranging a dingy ruffled shirt, a pair of gray trowsers, a black
velvet waistcoat, cut in the Elizabethan style, and a high, square
shirt collar, into which his head has the appearance of being jammed.
This collar he ties with a much-valued red and yellow Spittlefields,
the ends of which flow over his ruffle. Although the old man would not
bring much at the man-shambles, we set a great deal of store by him,
and would not exchange him for anything in the world but a regiment or
two of heroic secessionists. Indeed we are fully aware that nothing
like him exists beyond the highly perfumed atmosphere of our State. And
to many other curious accomplishments the old man adds that of telling
fortunes. The negroes seriously believe he has a private arrangement
with the devil, of whom he gets his wisdom, and the secret of
propitiating the gods.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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