He was then, as always, a child of extreme
fashion as to his clothes and the cut of his beard, which he wore in a
mustache and the drooping side-whiskers of the day, and his jovial
physiognomy was as winning as his voice, with its straight nose and
fascinating thrust of the under lip, its fine eyes, and good forehead,
then thickly crowned with the black hair which grew early white, while
his mustache remained dark the most enviable and consoling effect
possible in the universal mortal necessity of either aging or dying. He
was, as one could not help seeing, thickly pitted, but after the first
glance one forgot this, so that a lady who met him for the first time
could say to him, "Mr. Harte, aren't you afraid to go about in the cars
so recklessly when there is this scare about smallpox?" "No, madam," he
could answer in that rich note of his, with an irony touched by
pseudo-pathos, "I bear a charmed life."
The drive out from Boston was not too long for getting on terms of
personal friendship with the family which just filled the hack, the two
boys intensely interested in the novelties of a New England city and
suburb, and the father and mother continually exchanging admiration of
such aspects of nature as presented themselves in the leafless sidewalk
trees, and patches of park and lawn.
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