Col. Grangerford was a gentleman, you see. He was a gentleman all over;
and so was his family. He was well born, as the saying is, and that’s
worth as much in a man as it is in a horse, so the Widow Douglas said,
and nobody ever denied that she was of the first aristocracy in our
town; and pap he always said it, too, though he warn’t no more quality
than a mudcat himself. Col. Grangerford was very tall and very slim, and
had a darkish-paly complexion, not a sign of red in it anywheres; he was
clean-shaved every morning all over his thin face, and he had the
thinnest kind of lips, and the thinnest kind of nostrils, and a high
nose, and heavy eyebrows, and the blackest kind of eyes, sunk so deep
back that they seemed like they was looking out of caverns at you, as
you may say. His forehead was high, and his hair was gray and straight
and hung to his shoulders. His hands was long and thin, and every day of
his life he put on a clean shirt and a full suit from head to foot made
out of linen so white it hurt your eyes to look at it; and on Sundays he
wore a blue tail-coat with brass buttons on it. He carried a mahogany
cane with a silver head to it. There warn’t no frivolishness about him,
not a bit, and he warn’t ever loud. He was as kind as he could be—you
could feel that, you know, and so you had confidence. Sometimes he
smiled, and it was good to see; but when he straightened himself up like
a liberty-pole, and the lightning begun to flicker out from under his
eyebrows, you wanted to climb a tree first, and find out what the matter
was afterwards. He didn’t ever have to tell anybody to mind their
manners—everybody was always good-mannered where he was. Everybody loved
to have him around, too; he was sunshine most always—I mean he made it
seem like good weather. When he turned into a cloudbank it was awful
dark for half a minute, and that was enough; there wouldn’t nothing go
wrong for a week.
When him and the old lady came down in the morning all the family got up
out of their chairs and give them good day, and didn’t set down again
till _they_ had set down. Then Tom and Bob went to the sideboard where
the decanter was, and mixed a glass of bitters and handed it to him, and
he held it in his hand and waited till Tom’s and Bob’s was mixed, and
then they bowed and said, “Our duty to you, sir, and madam”; and _they_
bowed the least bit in the world and said thank you, and so they drank,
all three, and Bob and Tom poured a spoonful of water on the sugar and
the mite of whisky or apple brandy in the bottom of their tumblers, and
give it to me and Buck,[5] and we drank to the old people too.
Bob was the oldest and Tom next—tall, beautiful men with very broad
shoulders and brown faces, and long black hair and black eyes. They
dressed in white linen from head to foot, like the old gentleman, and
wore broad Panama hats.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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