Any
one guessing at his calling from his manner and appearance would have
set him down immediately as the captain of a merchantman, and would
have been willing to lay any wager that he had been several times round
the world.
But it was not his face, or his dress, or his manner, that drew on him
the attention of all his neighbors; it was his head. Under his hat,
(which was bran new, like everything else he wore), there appeared,
fitting tight round his temples and behind his ears, a black velvet
skull-cap. Not a vestige of hair peeped from under it. All round his
head, as far as could be seen beneath his hat, which he wore far back
over his coat collar, there was nothing but bare flesh, encircled by a
rim of black velvet.
From a great proposal for reform, to a small eccentricity in costume,
the English are the most intolerant people in the world, in their
reception of anything which presents itself to them under the form of a
perfect novelty. Let any man display a new project before the
Parliament of England, or a new pair of light-green trousers before the
inhabitants of London, let the project proclaim itself as useful to all
listening ears, and the trousers eloquently assert themselves as
beautiful to all beholding eyes, the nation will shrink suspiciously,
nevertheless, both from the one and the other; will order the first to
"lie on the table," and will hoot, laugh, and stare at the second;
will, in short, resent either novelty as an unwarrantable intrusion,
for no other discernible reason than that people in general are not
used to it.
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