to it or its dependencies as “that very extraordinary epoch forming the domination of the Baron Ritzner von Jung.” then of no particular age, by which I mean that it was impossible to form a guess respecting his age by any data personally afforded.  He might have been fifteen or fifty, and was twenty-one years and seven months.  He was by no means a handsome man —­ perhaps the reverse.  The contour of his face was somewhat angular and harsh.  His forehead was lofty and very fair; his nose a snub; his eyes large, heavy, glassy, and meaningless.  About the mouth there was more to be observed.  The lips were gently protruded, and rested the one upon the other, after such a fashion that it is impossible to conceive any, even the most complex, combination of human features, conveying so entirely, and so singly, the idea of unmitigated gravity, solemnity and repose.

It will be perceived, no doubt, from what I have already said, that the Baron was one of those human anomalies now and then to be found, who make the science of mystification the study and the business of their lives.  For this science a peculiar turn of mind gave him instinctively the cue, while his physical appearance afforded him unusual facilities for carrying his prospects into effect.  I quaintly termed the domination of the Baron Ritzner von Jung, ever rightly entered into the mystery which overshadowed his character.  I truly think that no person at the university, with the exception of myself, ever suspected him to be capable of a joke, verbal or practical:  —­ the old bull-dog at the garden-gate would sooner have been accused, —­ the ghost of Heraclitus, —­ or the wig of the Emeritus Professor of Theology.  This, too, when it was evident that the most egregious and unpardonable of all conceivable tricks, whimsicalities and buffooneries were brought about, if not directly by him, at least plainly through his intermediate agency or connivance.  The beauty, if I may so call it, of his art mystifique, lay in that consummate ability (resulting from an almost intuitive knowledge of human nature, and a most wonderful self-possession,) by means of which he never failed to make it appear that the drolleries he was occupied in bringing to a point, arose partly in spite, and partly in consequence of the laudable efforts he was making for their prevention, and for the preservation of the good order and dignity of Alma Mater.  The deep, the poignant, the overwhelming mortification, which upon each such failure of his praise worthy endeavors, would suffuse every lineament of his countenance, left not the slightest room for doubt of his sincerity in the bosoms of even his most skeptical companions.  The adroitness, too, was no less worthy of observation by which he contrived to shift the sense of the grotesque from the creator to the created —­ from his own person to the absurdities to which he had given rise.  In no instance before that of which I speak, have I known the habitual mystific escape the natural consequence