upon him like the head of Medusa, and almost turned him to stone.  And Mr. Hookey was fascinated too.  Merton also had become Medusafied, and exercised a petrifactive influence upon the barber.  He was nailed fast to the threshold of his own door, and gazed upon his fancied personification of Lara and Manfred with an indomitable and resistless perseverance, which utterly confounded himself; while Merton, nailed alike fast to the opposite footpath, stood staring at his antagonist, or rather at his nasal protuberance.  This impressive scene continued for several minutes, when Merton, regaining the power of locomotion, slowly approached the barber, his arms all the while crossed, and his eyes intently fixed upon the nose.  Nine slow and awful steps brought him face to face with Hookey.  The barber’s eyes were fixed intently upon his—­his eyes upon the barber’s nose.  The scene was extremely dreadful; and Mr. Hookey, after vainly trying to keep his ground, retreated into the shop, still facing Merton, who kept advancing upon him as he receded.  Back, step by step, went Hookey; forward, step by step, came Merton; each all the while eyeing the other with equal astonishment.  The barber continued retreating, the other following him,—­first through the shop, then through the kitchen, then through the parlour—­the three apartments leading into one another.  At last he got to the remotest corner of the parlour, and could get no farther.  Here he paused, and Merton paused also.  Still they gazed on each other,—­the barber in the corner overpowered with amazement, and the student standing before him hardly less surprised.  At last Merton broke silence in the following awful words,—­“GRACIOUS HEAVENS WHAT A NOSE!” So saying, he retreated as slowly as he entered, leaving Mr. Hookey utterly stupified and bewildered.  The sentence went like iron into the barber’s soul; he felt it in all its bitterness.

It is almost unnecessary to say what an effect this scene had upon the highly-susceptible temperament of Merton.  From that moment peace fled his mind.  He went instantly home; but instead of devoting himself, as before, to those studies in which he delighted, and in which he was wont so highly to excel, he immured himself in his chamber, giving way to gloomy abstraction, and agonizing his spirit with painful and most distressing fancies.  The great power of his imagination caused him, in a peculiar manner, to suffer from the remembrance of what he had witnessed; and, accordingly, his waking as well as his sleeping hours were haunted with visions of noses,—­noses of stupendous size, which arose, like ocean islands, amid the gloomy tabernacle of his brain, and filled him with utter despair.  At last, from bad to worse, he became the mere shadow of his former self, the wreck of what he was, and a picture of fallen and shattered genius.  To drive away the hideous phantasmagorias that tortured him, as with the stings of demons, he had recourse to gin, and soon became a confirmed drunkard:  the next stage was lunacy; and he was confined for fourteen months in Saint Luke’s Hospital for the insane.