Le Diable

by Miss Camilla Willyan

“I rede ye speak lowne, lest Kimmer should hear ye;

Come sain ye, come cross ye, an’ Gude be near ye!”

When my Cousin Tom came in one day, with two blue eyes in his head, I knew something had happened to him. Not that he kept an assortment of visual organs for different occasions; but the dear fellow’s eyes are like Nova-Scotia skies, their blue hidden, as a rule, and revealed as an exception. Pale films of thought, purple hazes of reverie or tenderness, Scotch mists of utter laziness—each had its turn. But on this occasion, as I have said, his eyes were blue. He shut the door, walked straight to the hearth-rug, put his hands behind him, turned his back to the fire, and faced me, all with military precision.

“Camilla,” he said, in a concise manner, “I have seen the devil!”

Naturally enough I asked what he was like.

“He is like a young woman twenty-two years of age,” said Tom. “He has a slight, limber form, he has an intellectual head, he has green-gray eyes that look like windows with the curtains down, he has a great deal of dull-brown hair that looks as though it grew in a hot place and were a little scorched, he has a long nose, a short upper lip, and a full under lip.”

“Most faces have chins.” I suggested, since he seemed to have got through.

“Chin? O, yes!—small and pointed—about as little of a chin as could well be tolerated. A chin, Camilla,” Tom said, taking his hands from behind his back, and placing the first two fingers on his right hand, in an argumentative way, in his left palm, “a chin means a good deal. A well-squared chin clinches the character, it denotes grip. A man with a well-squared chin may go down, but, in my opinion, he is meant to go up. A small chin is a loose rein; and ‘Facilis desecusus Averni’—you know.”

“I know nothing of the kind,” I said, pettishly, not knowing… Read More