"You can see it sticking out its head, and, if you go to smell the
flower, it scratches your nose." But on this occasion she had come
with a propitiatory gift--introducing her friend Mr. Leavenworth. Mr.
Leavenworth was a tall, expansive, bland gentleman, with a carefully
brushed whisker and a spacious, fair, well-favored face, which seemed,
somehow, to have more room in it than was occupied by a smile of
superior benevolence, so that (with his smooth, white forehead) it bore
a certain resemblance to a large parlor with a very florid carpet, but
no pictures on the walls. He held his head high, talked sonorously, and
told Roderick, within five minutes, that he was a widower, traveling
to distract his mind, and that he had lately retired from the
proprietorship of large mines of borax in Pennsylvania. Roderick
supposed at first that, in his character of depressed widower, he had
come to order a tombstone; but observing then the extreme blandness
of his address to Miss Blanchard, he credited him with a judicious
prevision that by the time the tombstone was completed, a monument
of his inconsolability might have become an anachronism.
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