a slim figure, round face, smooth brow, gentle eyes, perfect teeth to
the utmost extent of his laugh, and a head of hair free from the
plague-spot of incipient baldness which haunts the young men of this
generation, his appearance, now that he was confessedly a man, was very
much like that of an overgrown boy. On the contrary, when he was really
a boy, his extraordinary height (six feet at sixteen years) had given
him the outward semblance of a premature man. Probably his long legs and
arms, which were exceedingly supple, and were always swinging about with
a certain juvenile awkwardness, contributed much to the youthfulness of
his appearance.

At the time of his introduction here, his legs were as quiet as in their
nature they could be, having been elevated, for the greater comfort of
the owner, to the top of a pianoforte, and presenting an inclination of
forty-five degrees to Mr. Wilkeson's body, reposing calmly and smoking
an antique pipe in his favorite chair below. One of his long arms was
hanging listlessly by his side, and the other made a sharp projecting
elbow, and terminated in the interior of his vest. This was the attitude
which, of all possible adjustments of the human anatomy, Mr. Wilkeson
preferred; and he always assumed it and his pipe the moment he had put
on his dressing gown and Turkey slippers. He was well aware that popular
treatises on the "Art of Behavior" and the "Code of Politeness" were
extremely hard upon this disposition of the legs. His half-sister,
Philomela Wilkeson, who was high authority, had often visited his legs
with the severest censure, when, upon suddenly entering the room where
he was seated, she found the offending members confronting her from the
top of the piano, or the table, or a chair, or sometimes from the
mantelpiece. While Marcus Wilkeson admitted the full force of her
strictures as applied to legs in general, he claimed an exception for
his legs, which were always in his own or other people's way when they