No single symp—— I was about to say that no single symptom of a curiosity, however insignificant, is visible in my dwelling, when by audible tokens I was (or rather am) rendered sensible of the existence of a pair of bellows. Well, in these it must be admitted that we do possess a curiosity. We call them "bellows," because, on a close inspection, they appear to bear a much stronger resemblance to "bellows" than to any other species of domestic implement; but what in reality they are, the next annual meeting of the great Scientific Association must determine; or the public may decide for themselves when admitted hereafter to view the precious deposit in the British Museum. In the mean time, I vainly essay to picture the unpicturable.
Eccentric, noseless, broken-winded, dilapidated, but immortal, these bellows have been condemned to be burnt a thousand times at least; but they are bellows of such an obstinate turn of mind that to destroy them is impossible. No matter how imperative the order—how immediate the hour of sacrifice, they are sure to escape. So much for old maxims; we may "sing old Rose," but we cannot "burn the bellows." As often as a family accident happens—such as the arrival of a new servant, or the sudden necessity for rekindling an expiring fire, out come the bellows, and forth go into the most secret and silent corners of the house such sounds of wheezing, squeaking, groaning, screaming, and sighing, as might be heard in a louder, but not more intolerable key, beneath the roaring fires of Etna. Then, rising above these mingled notes, issues the rapid ringing of two bells at once, succeeded by a stern injunction to the startled domestic "never on any account to use those bellows again," but, on the contrary, to burn, eject, and destroy them without reservation or remorse. One might as well issue orders to burn the east wind. A magic more powerful even than womanly tenderness preserves them; and six weeks afterwards forth rolls once more that world of wondrous noises. Let no one imagine that I have really sketched the bellows, unless I had sketched their multitudinous voice. What I have felt when drawing Punch is, that it was easy to represent his eyes, his nose, his mouth; but that the one essential was after all wanting—the squeak. The musician who undertook to convey by a single sound a sense of the peculiar smell of the shape of a drum, could alone picture to the eye the howlings and whisperings of the preternatural bellows. Now you hear a moaning as of one put to the torture, and may detect both the motion of the engine and the cracking of the joints; anon cometh a sound as of an old beldame half inebriated, coughing and chuckling. A sigh as from the depths of a woman's heart torn with love, or the "lover sighing like furnace," succeeds to this; and presently break out altogether—each separate note of the straining pack struggling to be foremost—the yelping of a cur, the bellowing of a schoolboy, the tones of a cracked flute played by a learner, the grinding of notched knives, the slow ringing of a muffled muffin-bell, the interrupted rush of water down a leaky pipe, the motion of a pendulum that does not know its own mind, the creaking of a prison-door, and the voice of one who crieth the last dying speech and confession; together with fifty thousand similar sounds, each as pleasant to the ear as "When am I to have the eighteen-pence" would be, to a man who never had a shilling since the day he was breeched. The origin of the bellows, I know not; but a suspicion has seized me that they might have been employed in the Ark had there been a kitchen-fire there; and they may have assisted in raising a flame under the first tea-kettle put on to celebrate the laying of the first stone of the great wall of China. They are ages upon ages older than the bellows of Simple Simon's mother; and were they by him to be ripped open, they could not possibly be deteriorated in quality. The bellows which yet bear the inscription,
"Who rides on these bellows?
The prince of good fellows,
Willy Shakspeare,"
are a thing of yesterday beside these, which look as if they had been industriously exercised by some energetic Greek in fanning the earliest flame of Troy. To descend to later days, they must have invigorated the blaze at which Tobias Shandy lighted his undying pipe, and kindled a generous blaze under that hashed mutton which has rendered Amelia immortal. But "the days are gone when beauty bright" followed quick upon the breath of the bellows: their effect at present is, to give the fire a bad cold; they blow an influenza into the grate. Empires rise and fall, and a century hence the bellows may be as good as new. Like puffing, they will know no end.
(11.) And lastly—for the personality of this paragraph warns me to conclude—"In person G. C. is about the middle height and proportionably made. His complexion is something between pale and clear; and his hair, which is tolerably ample, partakes of a lightish hue. His face is of the angular form, and his forehead has a prominently receding shape."
As Hamlet said to the ghost, I'll go no further! The indefinite complexion, and the hair "partaking" of an opposite hue to the real one, may be borne; but I stand, not upon my head, but on my forehead! To a man who has once passed the Rubicon in having dared to publish his portrait, the exhibition of his mere profile can do no more injury than a petty larceny would after the perpetration of a highway robbery. But why be tempted to show, by an outline, that my forehead is innocent of a shape (the "prominently receding" one) that never yet was visible in nature or in art? Let it pass, till it can be explained.
"He delights in a handsome pair of whiskers." Nero had one flower flung upon his tomb. "He has somewhat of a dandified appearance." Flowers soon fade, and are cut down; and this is the "unkindest cut of all." I who, humbly co-operating with the press, have helped to give permanence to the name of dandy—I who have all my life been breaking butterflies upon wheels in warring against dandyism and dandies—am at last discovered to be "somewhat" of a dandy myself.