His
mode of living might testify that a gnawing remorse abode ever with him,
but his hair had not turned white in a single night, as the heads of
those suddenly stricken by a great shock or a great grief or any greatly
upsetting and disordering emotion sometimes are reputed to turn. Neither
in his youth nor when age came to him was his hair white. But for so far
back as any now remembered it had been a dullish gray, suggesting at a
distance dead lichens.
The color of his skin was a color to match in with the rest of him. It
was not pale, nor was it pasty. People with a taste for comparisons were
hard put to it to describe just what it was the hue of his face did
remind them of, until one day a man brought in from the woods the
abandoned nest of a brood of black hornets, still clinging to the
pendent twig from which the insect artificers had swung it. Darkies used
to collect these nests in the fall of the year when the vicious swarms
had deserted them. Their shredded parchments made ideal wadding for
muzzle-loading scatter-guns, and sufferers from asthma tore them down,
too, and burned them slowly and stood over the smoldering mass and
inhaled the fumes and the smoke which arose, because the country
wiseacres preached that no boughten stuff out of a drug store gave such
relief from asthma as this hornet's-nest treatment.
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