Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/106

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FROM THE LIFE


an adventurous short cut to it over the most obvious obstructions.

That day was a Sunday and a hot July Sunday, but people have to be governed seven days in the week, and Warren was at his library desk. There is no need to describe him, because he had already the rather repellant features that have since become so familiar to the American public. But I should like to explain that some of his features quite belied him.

He had already begun to achieve his resemblance to a mummy, with Pharaoh's bony nose. He looked parched and his skin was dry and leathery. But that was not an indication of any moral evil. It was due to indigestion. Poverty had ruined his stomach in his youth.

He had also the deep furrow between his eyebrows which the caricaturists have made so sinister, but it was not really sinister. In its origin it was a harmless pretension. He had contracted it at law-school, listening to lectures with an intense young expression of attention that had been designed to impress the lecturer. He had long since ceased trying to impress any one. Quite the opposite. When he was most attentive, now, he looked most absent-minded.

And he had the weasel-mouthed weak look which the cartoonists exaggerate, but if you could have drawn back his lips to bare his teeth, you would have found that his lower jaw closed up inside the

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