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THE ODD VOLUME
LEGEND OF THE LARGE MOUTH.
“Here’s a large mouth indeed!”
Shakspeare—King John.
Arriving one evening at an inn in Glasgow, I was shewn into a room which already contained a promiscuous assemblage of travellers. Amongst the rest, there was one whose features struck me as being the most horrible I ever beheld. He was a large, pursy old man, with a head “villainous low,” hair like bell-ropes, eyes that were the smallest and most porkish of all possible eyes, and a nose which shewed no more prominence en profile, than that of the moon as exhibited in her first quarter upon a freemason’s apron; but all these monstrosities were as beauties—as lovelinesses—as absolute perfections, compared with the mouth—the enormous mouth, which, grinning beneath, formed a sort of rustic basement to the whole superstructure of his facial horrors. This mouth—if mouth it might be called, which had so little resemblance to the mouths of mankind—turned full upon me as I entered; and, happening at the moment to be employed in a yawn, actually seemed as if it would have willingly received me into its prodigious crater, mumbled me to a mummy, and then bolted me, spurs and all!