To take the
instance of a face--we may never see it again, or it may become the
companion of our life, but there the picture is just as we /first/
knew it, the same smile or frown, the same look, unvarying and
unvariable, reminding us in the midst of change of the indestructible
nature of every experience, act, and aspect of our days. For that
which has been, is, since the past knows no corruption, but lives
eternally in its frozen and completed self.
These are somewhat large thoughts to be born of a small matter, but
they rose up spontaneously in the mind of a soldierly-looking man who,
on the particular evening when this history opens, was leaning over a
gate in an Eastern county lane, staring vacantly at a field of ripe
corn.
He was a peculiar and rather battered looking individual, apparently
over forty years of age, and yet bearing upon him that unmistakable
stamp of dignity and self-respect which, if it does not exclusively
belong to, is still one of the distinguishing attributes of the
English gentleman. In face he was ugly, no other word can express it.
Here were not the long mustachios, the almond eyes, the aristocratic
air of the Colonel of fiction--for our dreamer was a Colonel. These
were--alas! that the truth should be so plain--represented by somewhat
scrubby sandy-coloured whiskers, small but kindly blue eyes, a low
broad forehead, with a deep line running across it from side to side,
something like that to be seen upon the busts of Julius Caesar, and a
long thin nose.
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