MR. CARAMEL, WHO IS OBSERVANT, CONTEMPLATIVE, AND GIVEN TO COMPARISON,
ARRIVES AT THE CONCLUSION THAT SOME WOMEN ARE NICER THAN OTHERS.]

* * * * *

THE MISERIES OF A HANDSOME MAN.

Ever since my earliest recollections I have been a victim to
circumstances.

Beauty, which others desire and try every means to obtain, to me has
been a source of untold misery. From my infancy, when ugly women with
horrid breaths would stop my nurse in the streets and insist upon
kissing me--through my school-days, when the girls would pet me and
offer me a share of their nuts and candies, and the boys laugh at me in
consequence, and call me "gal-boy," squirt ink upon my face for
beauty-spots, and present me with curl-papers and flowers for my
hair--until the present, when I am denied introductions to young ladies
and am put off on old women--I have suffered for my looks.

In my boarding-house I am shunned as if I had the plague. When I enter
the parlor or dining-room, I see the ladies look at each other with a
knowing air, as much as to say, "Look at him!" And the answer is
telegraphed back, "Ain't he handsome? but he knows it," as if I could
help knowing it with every one telling me so fifty times a day; and
husbands pay unusual attention to their wives when I am around, as if I
were an ogre.

I am naturally a modest man, made more so by my extreme sensitiveness to