OLD SATAN AND TOM WILSON'S NOSE
"A nose, kind sir! Sure mother Nature,
With all her freaks, ne'er formed this feature.
If such were mine, I'd try and trade it,
And swear the gods had never made it."
After reducing the log cabin into some sort of order, we contrived,
with the aid of a few boards, to make a bed-closet for poor Tom
Wilson, who continued to shake every day with the pitiless ague.
There was no way of admitting light and air into this domicile,
which opened into the general apartment, but through a square hole
cut in one of the planks, just wide enough to admit a man's head
through the aperture. Here we made Tom a comfortable bed on the
floor, and did the best we could to nurse him through his sickness.
His long, thin face, emaciated with disease, and surrounded by huge
black whiskers, and a beard of a week's growth, looked perfectly
unearthly. He had only to stare at the baby to frighten her almost
out of her wits.
"How fond that young one is of me," he would say; "she cries for joy
at the sight of me."
Among his curiosities, and he had many, he held in great esteem a
huge nose, made hollow to fit his face, which his father, a being
almost as eccentric as himself, had carved out of boxwood.
