Lieutenant Sprawl, the officer with whom he was walking and keeping up
an animated conversation, was also in no small degree remarkable in his
externals, but in a totally different line. He was a tall man, at the
very least six feet high, and stout in proportion; very
square-shouldered; but, large as he was, his coat seemed to have been
made to fit even a stouter person, for the shoulder-straps (I think
that is the name) projected considerably beyond his shoulders, like the
projecting eaves of a Swiss cottage, thus giving the upper part of his
figure a sharp ungainly appearance. Below these wide-spreading
upperworks he tapered away to nothing at the loins, and over the hips
he was not the girth of a growing lad. His thighs were very short, but
his legs, from the knee down, were the longest I ever saw in man,
reversing all one's notions of proportion or symmetry, for they
gradually swelled out from the knee, until they ended in the ankle,
which emulated, if it did not altogether surpass, the calf in diameter.
When you looked at him in a front view, his lower spars, from the knee
down, were a facsimile of the letter V reversed; that is, with the apex
uppermost, while the long splay feet formed the strokes across at the
bottom, into which the shanks or shin-bones were morticed amidships as
nearly as may be, so that the heel projected aft very nearly as far as
the toe did forward, as if he had been built after the model of an
Indian proa, to sail backwards or forwards as might be required,
without either tacking or wearing. These formidable looking props were
conspicuously stuck out before him, where they kept cruising about, of
their own accord apparently, as if they were running away with the man;
while, as he walked, he vehemently swung his arms backwards and
forwards, as if they had been paddles necessary to propel him ahead,
carrying on leisurely when he first turned, but gradually increasing
his pace as he proceeded, until he sculled along at a terrible rate.
His head was very large, and thatched with a great fell of coarse red
hair, hanging down in greasy masses on each side of his pale freckled
visage, until it blended into two immense, whiskers, which he
cultivated under his chin with such care, that he appeared to be
peeping through a fur collar, like a Madagascar ourang-outang. His
eyes were large, prominent, and of a faded blue, like those of a dead
fish; his general loveliness being diversified by a very noticeable
squint. He had absolutely no eyebrows, but a curious nondescript sort
of tumble-out forehead, as like an ill-washed winter-turnip in its
phrenological developement as one could well imagine; and as for his
nose, it had the regular twist of a rifleman's powder-horn. But his
lovely mouth, who shall describe it? Disdaining to claim acquaintance
with the aforesaid beak, it had chosen its site under the left eye, so
that a line--I here address myself to mathematical readers--drawn from
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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