The bust of the General was unquestionably the finest bust I ever saw. For your life you could not have found a fault with its wonderful proportion. This rare peculiarity set off to great advantage a pair of shoulders which would have called up a blush of conscious inferiority into the countenance of the marble Apollo. I have a passion for fine shoulders, and may say that I never beheld them in perfection before. The arms altogether were admirably modelled. Nor were the lower limbs less superb. These were, indeed, the _ne plus ultra_ of good legs. Every connoisseur in such matters admitted the legs to be good. There was neither too much flesh, nor too little,—neither rudeness nor fragility. I could not imagine a more graceful curve than that of the _os femoris_, and there was just that due gentle prominence in the rear of the _fibula_ which goes to the conformation of a properly proportioned calf. I wish to God my young and talented friend Chiponchipino, the sculptor, had but seen the legs of Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith. But although men so absolutely fine-looking are neither as plenty as reasons or blackberries, still I could not bring myself to believe that _the remarkable_ something to which I alluded just now,—that the odd air of _je ne sais quoi_ which hung about my new acquaintance,—lay altogether, or indeed at all, in the supreme excellence of his bodily endowments. Perhaps it might be traced to the _manner_;—yet here again I could not pretend to be positive. There _was_ a primness, not to say stiffness, in his carriage—a degree of measured, and, if I may so express it, of rectangular precision, attending his every movement, which, observed in a more diminutive figure, would have had the least little savor in the world, of affectation, pomposity or constraint, but which noticed in a gentleman of his undoubted dimensions, was readily placed to the account of reserve, _hauteur_—of a commendable sense, in short, of what is due to the dignity of colossal proportion. The kind friend who presented me to General Smith whispered in my ear some few words of comment upon the man. He was a _remarkable_ man—a _very_ remarkable man—indeed one of the _most_ remarkable men of the age. He was an especial favorite, too, with the ladies—chiefly on account of his high reputation for courage. “In _that_ point he is unrivalled—indeed he is a perfect desperado—a down-right fire-eater, and no mistake,” said my friend, here dropping his voice excessively low, and thrilling me with the mystery of his tone.