During this long salutation those who had not known the prince before had an opportunity to study his outward appearance. His was a Herculean form, calculated to impress a professional boxer forcibly, and to create a sensation in a circus, dressed up as an athlete; but for ordinary life was, perhaps, a little too large. Upon the large, powerful body, whose height was in full harmony with the breadth of the shoulders and the magnificent chest, there was set a head more angular than round, covered all over with short, curling black hair, and firmly resting upon a neck which looked too short for the size of the head. The features of the face corresponded with the whole. The brow was low and straight, the eyes of bright darkness but small, and apparently still further reduced in size by the heavy eyelids with their dark lashes. The nose as well as the thick lips were somewhat protruding. A beard, thicker and blacker than the hair on the head, covered the cheeks and the upper lip. The chin alone, shaved smooth, in military style, was the energetic base of this energetic face. Taken all in all, the assertion made by Hortense that the prince looked like a Mongolian agreed as little with the reality as Emily's judgment that he was strikingly handsome. Nevertheless, the whole was a far too striking individuality and too full of character to be called plain, even if the strict rules of ideal beauty were not all observed. A physiognomist would in vain have looked for ideal qualities of any kind in the face of the prince, but he would have discovered, in return, a most energetic, powerful will; and, perhaps, if he had examined carefully, a boundless pride, which slept with open eyes behind the mask, like a lion behind the bars of his cage, and could be roused by a mere nothing. The prince wore the simple uniform of the regiment in garrison in Grunwald, but the two decorations on his breast--a small cross set in diamonds, probably Russian; and the order of the Blue Falcon of the second class, with crossed swords--proved abundantly that he was a man whose importance was great, aside from epaulet and sword-knot.