the other following him,--first through the shop, then through the kitchen, then through the parlour--the three apartments leading into one another. At last he got to the remotest corner of the parlour, and could get no farther. Here he paused, and Merton paused also. Still they gazed on each other,--the barber in the corner overpowered with amazement, and the student standing before him hardly less surprised. At last Merton broke silence in the following awful words,--"GRACIOUS HEAVENS WHAT A NOSE!" So saying, he retreated as slowly as he entered, leaving Mr. Hookey utterly stupified and bewildered. The sentence went like iron into the barber's soul; he felt it in all its bitterness. It is almost unnecessary to say what an effect this scene had upon the highly-susceptible temperament of Merton. From that moment peace fled his mind. He went instantly home; but instead of devoting himself, as before, to those studies in which he delighted, and in which he was wont so highly to excel, he immured himself in his chamber, giving way to gloomy abstraction, and agonizing his spirit with painful and most distressing fancies. The great power of his imagination caused him, in a peculiar manner, to suffer from the remembrance of what he had witnessed; and, accordingly, his waking as well as his sleeping hours were haunted with visions of noses,--noses of stupendous size, which arose, like ocean islands, amid the gloomy tabernacle of his brain, and filled him with utter despair. At last, from bad to worse, he became the mere shadow of his former self, the wreck of what he was, and a picture of fallen and shattered genius. To drive away the hideous phantasmagorias that tortured him, as with the stings of demons, he had recourse to gin, and soon became a confirmed drunkard: the next stage was lunacy; and he was confined for fourteen months in Saint Luke's Hospital for the insane. The fate of the barber was equally deplorable. The awful words pronounced by Merton may be considered his death-knell. They rang ever after in his ears; and, in a few weeks, his head was turned, his shop shut up, and himself sent to Bedlam. "_Gracious heavens, what a nose!_" This dreadful sentence--more dreadful than the hand-writing on the wall to Belshazzar,--haunted him by day and by night. Reason was dethroned, and "moody madness, laughing wild," was the result. Such are the frightful consequences of _extreme susceptibility_, against which the youth of both sexes ought to be constantly on their guard.