"See," he concluded, with an
assuring wave of the hand toward the subject, "see; he is about to
address you. Now, quiet!--utter quiet, if you please!"
"Great heavens!" exclaimed my friend, stiflingly; "Just look at the
boy! Get onto that position for a poet! Even Sweeney has fled from the
sight of him!"
And truly, too, it was a grotesque pose the young man had assumed; not
wholly ridiculous either, since the dwarfed position he had settled
into seemed more a genuine physical condition than an affected one.
The head, back-tilted, and sunk between the shoulders, looked
abnormally large, while the features of the face appeared peculiarly
child-like--especially the eyes--wakeful and wide apart, and very
bright, yet very mild and very artless; and the drawn and cramped
outline of the legs and feet, and of the arms and hands, even to the
shrunken, slender-looking fingers, all combined to most strikingly
convey to the pained senses the fragile frame and pixey figure of some
pitiably afflicted child, unconscious altogether of the pathos of its
own deformity.
"Now, mark the kuss, Horatio!" gasped my friend.
At first the speaker's voice came very low, and somewhat piping, too,
and broken--an eerie sort of voice it was, of brittle and erratic
_timbre_ and undulant inflection.
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