“How fond that young one is of me,” he would say; “she cries for joy at the sight of me.”

Among his curiosities, and he had many, he held in great esteem a huge nose, made hollow to fit his face, which his father, a being almost as eccentric as himself, had carved out of boxwood.  When he slipped this nose over his own (which was no beautiful classical specimen of a nasal organ), it made a most perfect and hideous disguise.  The mother who bore him never would have recognised her accomplished son.

Numberless were the tricks he played off with this nose.  Once he walked through the streets of —–­, with this proboscis attached to his face.  “What a nose!  Look at the man with the nose!” cried all the boys in the street.  A party of Irish emigrants passed at the moment.  The men, with the courtesy natural to their nation, forbore to laugh in the gentleman’s face; but after they had passed, Tom looked back, and saw them bent half double in convulsions of mirth.  Tom made the party a low bow, gravely took off his nose, and put it in his pocket.

The day after this frolic, he had a very severe fit of the ague, and looked so ill that I really entertained fears for his life.  The hot fit had just left him, and he lay upon his bed bedewed with a cold perspiration, in a state of complete exhaustion.

“Poor Tom,” said I, “he has passed a horrible day, but the worst is over, and I will make him a cup of coffee.”  While preparing it, Old Satan came in and began to talk to my husband.  He happened to sit directly opposite the aperture which gave light and air to Tom’s berth.  This man was disgustingly ugly.  He had lost one eye in a quarrel.  It had been gouged out in the barbarous conflict, and the side of his face presented a succession of horrible scars inflicted by the teeth of his savage adversary.  The nickname he had acquired through the country sufficiently testified to the respectability of his character, and dreadful tales were told of him in the neighbourhood, where he was alike feared and hated.

The rude fellow, with his accustomed insolence, began abusing the old country folks.

The English were great bullies, he said; they thought no one could fight but themselves; but the Yankees had whipped them, and would whip them again.  He was not afear’d of them, he never was afear’d in his life.

Scarcely were the words out of his mouth, when a horrible apparition presented itself to his view.  Slowly rising from his bed, and putting on the fictitious nose, while he drew his white nightcap over his ghastly and livid brow, Tom thrust his face through the aperture, and uttered a diabolical cry; then sank down upon his unseen couch as noiselessly as he had arisen.  The cry was like nothing human, and it was echoed by an involuntary scream from the lips of our maid-servant and myself.

“Good God! what’s that?” cried Satan, falling back in his chair, and pointing to the vacant aperture.  “Did you hear it? did you see it?  It beats the universe.  I never saw a ghost or the devil before!”