The character of Oswald might have been easily read in his personal appearance. He was a rather handsome specimen of a pure Anglo-Saxon; he was of medium height, of a stout and well-set form; with a round head, smooth, white, receding forehead, shaded with thickly clustered curls of auburn hair; prominent, clear, light-blue eyes, whose prevailing expression was that of frank mirthfulness; a straight nose; a well-curved, but rather sensual mouth; and a full, rounded chin, that, altogether, made up a countenance whose chief characteristics were good nature, sensuality and gayety. His dress was equally remarkable for the costliness of its material and the negligence of its arrangement; and left the point at issue, whether the costume were the more extravagant or the more slovenly. His manners were marked by habitual cheerfulness, good temper and love of merriment. And, though he rarely emitted a flash of wit, he was ever the quickest to appreciate that gift in others; and it must have been a dull jest, indeed, that his ready laugh did not hail. And it is not unlikely that to his sincere, hearty, contagious laughter he owed a great deal of his popularity among men, and women too. For who does not love a good laugher? Valentine was in almost every respect the antipodes of his master, yet resembled him in this, that his nature also might be easily read in his dark but singularly beautiful face. I use the term "beautiful" instead of the other term "handsome" advisedly, as more proper to the subject under description. Valentine was rather below the medium height, and slightly but elegantly formed, with a stately little head, delicate aquiline features, a complexion dark as a Spaniard's, bluish-black hair falling in many well-trained curls around the dark face, and light-blue eyes so deeply veiled under their thicket of long, close lashes, that it was only in moments of excitement, when they suddenly lightened, that their strange, startling, almost terrible contrast to the blackness of the hair and darkness of the skin could be noticed. In the matter of dress, Valentine was fastidious to a degree. In other circumstances, he might have been an exquisite and a _petit maitre_, as his master often laughingly called him. As it was, the youth was undeniably a dandy; but his love of dress was to be attributed fully as much to his innate love of order, beauty, and propriety, as to his coxcombry. His fine raven-black hair--his "favorite vanity," was carefully kept, and trained to fall in those faultless ringlets; and it is upon record, that when the owner was not in full dress, that "splendid head of hair" was carefully bound down from injury by sun or dust, under a double silk bandanna, arranged in the graceful folds and twists of a Turkish turban. Valentine's "foppery" was a never-failing source of merriment to his fun-loving master--though I think the boy's love of dress could scarcely with fairness be called foppery, since he was never known to try the