A TERRIBLE NOSE.
I was to-day brought in contact with an old gentleman named Bickerstaff, who keeps a crockery store in the village where I am visiting. This Bickerstaff is the unfortunate possessor of the queerest-looking nose I have yet encountered.
It was not the original intention of Providence that he should follow such a proboscisthrough life, for there was a time when he, like other men, had a forerunner ornamental as well as useful. But through an accident, the nose he now bears in all its deformity was shoved upon him.
BUSTING HIS BUGLE.
BUSTING HIS BUGLE.
BUSTING HIS BUGLE.
It seems one day, while furiously pursuing a little urchin who had mischievously put a stone through a glass jar by the door, he ran his face against the end of a scantling a boy was carrying past on his shoulder, and set his nose well up on his forehead in a triangular lump.
Strange to say, no inducements that the surgeon could hold out served to coax it back toits former position. His wife, who was young, and rather prepossessing in appearance, worried terribly about it. She finally left him, and went to live with her mother, and immediately set about obtaining a divorce from him.
She would, in all probability, have obtained it, if she had not died before the case was properly laid before the commissioners; because she was capable of doing better, and when you come to see the nose with which she wished to sever her connections, you could hardly blame her. Old Bickerstaff, to tell the honest truth, did look like the very old Nick in masquerade costume.
His nose, as it reposed between his eyebrows, displayed an enormous pair of nostrils large as front-door keyholes. At a short distance a person would think he had four eyes in his head. He was the living terror of the school children who daily passed his place of business. They either scurried past on the run, or with their hands over their eyes.
Even among creeping infants—who had often shrunk back from the threshold as old Bickerstaff passed the door—he was known asthe Boo; and there was no danger of them crawling into the street while he remained in the vicinity.
Nervously-inclined women also avoided him. They would cut across the road when they saw him coming toward them, or turn back, feeling their pockets as though they had forgotten something, and hurry back to go round some other way.
Dogs never barked at him. If they happened to be engaged in that pastime when he hove in sight, they would slope off the demonstration into a yelp. And as if they had suddenly recollected that they were wanted at home about that time, they tucked their tails between their legs and dusted away at a lively rate. Hitched horses even snorted lustily and pulled hard upon their halters when old Bickerstaff shuffled by.
The old gentleman had a pew in the church directly in front of the pulpit, and the first time he attended divine worship after his nose had been set up, he threw the minister out of his discourse altogether. He couldn’t keep run of what he wanted to say, no way he could fix it.He had Jonah swallowing the whale, instead of the whale doing the job for Jonah.
No matter how much he endeavored to keep his eyes in some other direction, they would invariably wander back to rest upon that terrible sight, and then he would be off the track again in a twinkling. The next day the trustees of the church waited on Bickerstaff, and in the most polite manner possible requested him to exchange his pew for one farther removed from the pulpit.
The old fellow—who, by the way, had considerable temper—flew off the handle at once, and in the most unchristian-like language denounced the church and the doctrine that would draw the line of demarkation between fair faces and plain.
He informed the trustees if the parson didn’t like the looks of his congregation, he could turn his pulpit around facing the other way. Yet, though he was rough in his speech, and given to storming considerably when his pride was touched, he was not altogether lacking in those qualities which go far to make up your real man; and when the trustees offeredto give him the side pewrent free, his voice at once grew low, and in a becoming manner he accepted the situation. After that, things were not quite as bad. The minister occasionally got a quartering view of him, but the odd-looking disfigurement didn’t strike him with full force. Still, I was informed, the Reverend gentleman’s discourse was principally addressed to the hearers on the other side of the church, thereafter.
But—to his credit be it mentioned—he always turned in the direction of old Bickerstaff when he closed his eyes in prayer.