bold as brass. There was more poetry in E. G. W, than there was in
Aleck, after all."




II

IN THE TOILS

Mr. Ezekiel George Washington Scraggs, late of Missouri, later of
Utah, and latest of North Dakota, stood an even six-foot unshod.
He had an air of leanness, almost emaciation, not borne out by any
fact of anatomy. We make our hasty estimates from the face.
Brother Scraggs's face was gaunt. Misfortune had written there, in
a large, angular hand, "It might have been"--those saddest words of
tongue or pen. The pensive sorrow of E. G. W.'s countenance had
misled many people--not but what the sorrow was genuine enough
(Scraggsy explained it in four words, "I've been a Mormon"), but
the expression of a blighted, helpless youth carried into early
middle age was an appearance only: I mean it was nothing to bank on
in dealing with Zeke. Still, if you could see those eyes, dimmed
with a settled melancholy; those mustachios, which, absorbing all
the capillary possibilities of his head, drooped like weeping
willows from his upper lip; and above, the monumental nose--that
springing prow that once so grandly parted the waves of adverse
circumstance, until, blown by the winds of ambition, his bark was
cast ruined on the shores of matrimony--you would not so much blame
the man who mistook E. G. Washington Scraggs for a something not
too difficult. Red Saunders said that Scraggsy looked like a