This was a fresh-coloured young gentleman, with as good a promise
of light whisker as one might wish to see, and possessed of a very
velvet-like, soft-looking countenance. We do not use the latter
term invidiously, but merely to denote a pair of smooth, plump,
highly-coloured cheeks of capacious dimensions, and a mouth rather
remarkable for the fresh hue of the lips than for any marked or
striking expression it presented. His whole face was suffused with
a crimson blush, and bore that downcast, timid, retiring look,
which betokens a man ill at ease with himself.

There was nothing in these symptoms to attract more than a passing
remark, but our attention had been originally drawn to the bashful
young gentleman, on his first appearance in the drawing-room above-
stairs, into which he was no sooner introduced, than making his way
towards us who were standing in a window, and wholly neglecting
several persons who warmly accosted him, he seized our hand with
visible emotion, and pressed it with a convulsive grasp for a good
couple of minutes, after which he dived in a nervous manner across
the room, oversetting in his way a fine little girl of six years
and a quarter old-and shrouding himself behind some hangings, was
seen no more, until the eagle eye of the hostess detecting him in
his concealment, on the announcement of dinner, he was requested to
pair off with a lively single lady, of two or three and thirty.

This most flattering salutation from a perfect stranger, would have
gratified us not a little as a token of his having held us in high
respect, and for that reason been desirous of our acquaintance, if
we had not suspected from the first, that the young gentleman, in
making a desperate effort to get through the ceremony of
introduction, had, in the bewilderment of his ideas, shaken hands