pet vice more if my gentle tormentor had been a smoker herself, and an
advocate of the practice. Well, the sight of her handwriting reminded me
that I way getting very hungry to see her again. I easily guessed what I
should find in her letter. I opened it. Good! just as I expected; she
was coming! Coming this very day, too, and by the morning train; I might
expect her any moment.

I said to myself, "I am thoroughly happy and content now. If my most
pitiless enemy could appear before me at this moment, I would freely
right any wrong I may have done him."

Straightway the door opened, and a shriveled, shabby dwarf entered. He
was not more than two feet high. He seemed to be about forty years old.
Every feature and every inch of him was a trifle out of shape; and so,
while one could not put his finger upon any particular part and say,
"This is a conspicuous deformity," the spectator perceived that this
little person was a deformity as a whole--a vague, general, evenly
blended, nicely adjusted deformity. There was a fox-like cunning in the
face and the sharp little eyes, and also alertness and malice. And yet,
this vile bit of human rubbish seemed to bear a sort of remote and
ill-defined resemblance to me! It was dully perceptible in the mean
form, the countenance, and even the clothes, gestures, manner, and
attitudes of the creature. He was a farfetched, dim suggestion of a
burlesque upon me, a caricature of me in little. One thing about him
struck me forcibly and most unpleasantly: he was covered all over with a
fuzzy, greenish mold, such as one sometimes sees upon mildewed bread.
The sight of it was nauseating.

He stepped along with a chipper air, and flung himself into a doll's
chair in a very free-and-easy way, without waiting to be asked. He