while fractured. All medical men, like all
ministers of floating congregations, are for ever
getting their noses put out of joint; but they
are not eels in general, and do not, so far as I
know, become accustomed to the process, nor
indifferent to its discomfort.

It is the public, and not a mere private
individual here and there, that regulates the
nasal line of operatic and theatrical stars; but
there is always a succession of noses out of
joint with them, each new star eclipsing all the
former ones, unless of the first magnitude, and
sending their noses as flat as peacocks' tails in
the rain. But they are almost the only people
whose noses are elastic, and able to spring back
again to the original arch after flattening by
rivals. And with them a new piece, with only a
fine dress or a striking attitude in it, will put
everything straight again, like one of those
india-rubber faces when you take away your
thumbs, and let the face go back to its
original condition.

But perhaps the place where noses get the
hardest of these thumps and bumps, is in the
country, where there is a local tendency to hero-
worship, and the cordial recognition of
homemade gods, if not the preference. There are
always certain Aristoi in a country place—the
Best of their kind and class—Brahmins of beauty
or talent or grace or wealth, which society
there accepts as its culminating point—ideals
from which, according to some of the simpler
sort, there is no beyond.  For instance, there is
Miss Lucy, the declared beauty of Littletown,
the finest and handsomest and dearest and
gracefullest young lady as ever was or ever
could be. It would be little less than high
treason to hint at any flaw in Miss Lucy's
perfections. Her dress is a model of taste and
elegance, combined with practicability and
economy: does she not go twice a year to her
cousins at Canonbury, in London, bringing
home the fashions, which all the milliners and
shopkeepers' wives of Littletown incontinently
copy, and never by any chance make to come
right or like the original? And has she not the
thickest and longest and loveliest golden hair
in the world? It is a tradition down there that
Truefitt once offered her five pounds if she
would only let him cut off enough to make a
coronet for a duchess who had commissioned
him for a tail of that exact shade, no matter
what the cost. And has she not the clearest and
deepest blue eyes, just the colour of very good
sapphires? and the trimmest waist, and the
smallest feet for miles round? Old Last, the
head shoemaker of Littletown, always exhibits
Miss Lucy's shoes and boots as models of what
shoes and boots should be, and as he could
make them too, if all feet were what they ought
to be. And so Miss Lucy's reign has been
undisturbed for this last six or seven years (for
beauties reign long in the country), and would
have remained undisturbed to the end of her
generation, if Miss Bella Belinda had not come
whisking down one day on a visit to the vicar,
and shown the poor benighted natives what
taste and beauty and fashion really were. Miss
Bella Belinda had lived in Paris; she had seen
Rome and Florence, and Naples and Geneva;
it was her boast that not an article of her attire
was English, and that she was foreign all over,
from her hat to her boots—which were smaller
than Miss Lucy's, of daintier material and of
neater make.

Imagine the state of poor Miss Lucy's nose
after the arrival of Miss Bella Belinda! Her
golden curls went down in the Littletown
market to the price of tow; her eyes were only
porcelain beads imitative of turquoise, and no
longer precious stones of the value of lapis
lazuli or sapphires; she was all very well, you
know, but nothing so very particular after all;
and then she had decidedly gone off these last
few years. Miss Lucy was, let me see—yes!
Miss Lucy was certainly eight-and-twenty if
she was a day, and young ladies at eight-and-
twenty have turned the corner, and are travelling
down hill a little. Now Miss Bella Belinda
was very different. There was a young lady
worth looking at if you like! Look at her hair
and her eyes and her hands and her skin, and, in
short, look at all that was hers, and then
uphold Miss Lucy as prima donna if you liked!
Poor Miss Lucy!—Lucy Poocey as her friends
used to call her—she learnt the fickleness of
popular favour and the theory of noses out of
joint as well as the most notorious hero with a
smashed pedestal, lying prostrate on the ground
with his nose in the mud, instead of turned
proudly up to heaven, sniffing the sweet odours
of gum-benjamin burning in the censers swinging
beneath. But she was good-natured, partly
because she was indifferent and lazy; so she
took suit and service in Miss Bella Belinda's
court.

The young men in the country go through the
same kind of thing. Young Thomson, and
Johnson, and Smithson, are all very well—oh!
very well indeed! while there are no fresh
importations, and they stand undisturbed in their
quality as native beaux; but let an irruption
come—let the neighbouring town receive a
garrison—let a party of Cantabs come down to read
during the Long—let young Sir Fred Norman
take Tumbledown Hall and convert it into a
shooting-box for the season, with plenty of
pleasant fellows and jolly parties to help the
dulness of Littletown—and then look at our
young natives' noses, and see to their condition
of flatness!

It is the same thing with the reigning belle
of the county balls, when another belle flashes
into her sphere; the same when little sissy
comes, and poor little brother's nose is put out
in the nursery where it has ruled the whole
house with its tiny knob for nearly two years
now; the same when Miss Petlove changes her
doctor or her minister, and when Mr. Loveall
changes his ideal; the same when the long
"affair" of many years—that enduring flirtation
of half a lifetime—suddenly breaks off,
not in the pleasant consummation of matrimony,
but into the divergence of a new thread