“At the hotel where we put up [he writes] we had a most singular and whimsical assemblage of beings.  I don’t know whether you were ever at an English watering-place, but if you have not been, you have missed the best opportunity of studying English oddities, both moral and physical.  I no longer wonder at the English being such excellent caricaturists, they have such an inexhaustible number and variety of subjects to study from.  The only care should be not to follow fact too closely, for I’ll swear I have met with characters and figures that would be condemned as extravagant, if faithfully delineated by pen or pencil.  At a watering-place like Buxton, where people really resort for health, you see the great tendency of the English to run into excrescences and bloat out into grotesque deformities.  As to noses, I say nothing of them, though we had every variety:  some snubbed and turned up, with distended nostrils, like a dormer window on the roof of a house; others convex and twisted like a buck-handled knife; and others magnificently efflorescent, like a full-blown cauliflower.  But as to the persons that were attached to these noses, fancy any distortion, protuberance, and fungous embellishment that can be produced in the human form by high and gross feeding, by the bloating operations of malt liquors, and by the rheumy influence of a damp, foggy, vaporous climate.  One old fellow was an exception to this, for instead of acquiring that expansion and sponginess to which old people are prone in this country, from the long course of internal and external soakage they experience, he had grown dry and stiff in the process of years.  The skin of his face had so shrunk away that he could not close eyes or mouth—­the latter, therefore, stood on a perpetual ghastly grin, and the former on an incessant stare.  He had but one serviceable joint in his body, which was at the bottom of the backbone, and that creaked and grated whenever he bent.  He could not raise his feet from the ground, but skated along the drawing-room carpet whenever he wished to ring the bell.  The only sign of moisture in his whole body was a pellucid drop that I occasionally noticed on the end of a long, dry nose.  He used generally to shuffle about in company with a little fellow that was fat on one side and lean on the other.  That is to say, he was warped on one side as if he had been scorched before the fire; he had a wry neck, which made his head lean on one shoulder; his hair was smugly powdered, and he had a round, smirking, smiling, apple face, with a bloom on it like that of a frost-bitten leaf in autumn.  We had an old, fat general by the name of Trotter, who had, I suspect, been promoted to his high rank to get him out of the way of more able and active officers, being an instance that a man may occasionally rise in the world through absolute lack of merit.  I could not help watching the movements of this redoubtable old Hero, who, I’ll warrant, has been the