Tom has seen thirty summers, presents a full, rounded figure, and stands some five feet ten.  He wears an old brown coat, cut after the fashion of a surtout, that might have fitted him, he says, when he was a man.  But it has lost the right cuff, the left flap, and a part of the collar; the nefarious moths, too, have made a sieve of its back.  His trowsers are of various colors, greasy down the sides, ragged at the bottoms, and revealing two encrusted ancles, with feet stuck into old shoes, turned under at the heels for convenience sake.  A remark from the cribber touches his pride, and borrowing a few pins he commences pinning together the shattered threads of his nether garment.  A rope-yarn secured about his waist gives a sailor-like air to his outfit.  But, notwithstanding Tom affects the trim of the craft, the skilled eye can easily detect the deception; for the craftsman, even under a press of head sail, preserves a becoming rig.

Indeed, Tom might have attempted without effect, during his natural life, to transform himself into a sailor.  The destroyer was his victor; the inner man was but a reflex of the outer.  He pulled an old cloth cap over his face, which was immersed in a massive black beard, bordering two red, swollen cheeks; and with his begrimed hands he rubbed lustily his inflamed eyes—­once brown, large, and earnest—­now glassy and sunken.

“I’m all square, ain’t I?” he inquires, looking with vacant stare into the faces of those who tease him with facetious remarks, then scans his haberdashery.  There yet remains something displeasing to him.  His sense of taste is at stake.  This something proves to be a sooty striped shirt, open in front, and disclosing the remains of a red flannel under-garment.  Every few minutes will he, as if touched with a sense of shame, wriggle his shoulders, and pull forward the wreck of his collarless coat, apparently much annoyed that it fails to cover the breastwork of his distress.

Again he thrusts his hands into his pockets, and with an air of apparent satisfaction, struts twice or thrice across the dingy room, as if he would show how far he has gained his equilibrium.  “I shall go straight mad; yes, mad, if the whiskey be not brought in,” he pursues, stopping short in one of his sallies, and with a rhetorical flourish, pointing at the piece of silver he so exultingly tossed upon the table.  As if his brain were again seized by the destroyer’s flame, his countenance becomes livid, his eyes glare wildly upon each object near him; then he draws himself into a tragic attitude, contorts hideously his more hideous face, throws his cap scornfully to the ground, and commences tearing from his head the matted black hair that confusedly covers it.  “If my mother thinks this a fit place for me—­” He pauses in the middle of his sentence, gives an imploring stare at his companions, shakes and hangs down his head; then his brain reels, and his frame trembles, and like a lifeless mass he falls to the floor.