eyes.  You might bray him in a mortar and boil the powder in a caldron, yet amid all the envy, hatred, and malice that made up the ingredients, Beast would have triumphantly floated on the top.  Beast!  Beast!  Beast!  Beast!  The universal verdict clutched him like the shirt of Nessus.  He actually grew proud of the title, and received the stigma with a cluck of beastly joy, as though inspired with a certain beastly ambition to deserve it.  The laugh with which he hailed any appeal to his charity was monstrous.  It commenced with a leathery wheeze like the puff of asthmatic bellows; it croaked with a grating chuckle, as if his throat opened on rusty hinges; and then it broke out in a shrill vocal shudder, that sounded like the shriek of a hyena.

It is an idiosyncrasy of mine to foster just such pet abominations; and I cultivated Hardy Gripstone.  My advances were not encouraged by that overweening tenderness that indicates the possible victim of misplaced confidence.  Far from “wearing his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at,” it seemed to have been weaned years agone, and my milk of human kindness fell flat as any whipped syllabub.

Felicitous as were the suggestions of his suspicious brain, it took me fully three months to descend in his bearish estimation from a highwayman to a ninny.  There was an incredibility in my apparent lack of motive that puzzled him.  His dubious cordiality was doled out under protest.  As an exhibitor would clutch a vicious ape, he grabbed at every show of feeling, and almost throttled the most pitiful courtesy, in his nervous dread of its doing him some bodily harm.  There was a low cunning in his very acceptance of any little kindness.  The sly way in which he insinuated his withered face into my morning papers, and the smirk of satisfaction with which he gloated on the triumph of having gratuitously gleaned their entire contents, was in keeping with every other ludicrous phase of his distorted nature.  He looked upon me as a paragon of stupidity; and I fear I considered him a piece of personal property, and felt as much pride in the possession as did Barnum in his Aztec children.

I do not think the acquaintance tended in any way to exaggerate my ideas of human purity.  Though it extended through several years, no guilty act I ever heard of detracted from his deserved reputation for beastliness.  My surmises never ventured to the hazardous period of infancy, or risked the doubtful thought that kith or kin could have loved him; but I have often wondered if there ever was a time when his rapacity found employment in the robbing of a hen’s nest, or his grasping ambition culminated in the swop of a jack-knife.  I wondered if in all the grotesque concomitants that congregated to make up the hideous whole, there existed a redeeming trait.  Yes, there was one,—­one I discovered in the tears that sprung from his unrelenting eyes and rained on his cadaverous cheeks.  What was the anguish that shook his beastly frame? what the agony that tore his grasping nature? who was the Moses that smote water from this rock?