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COL. GRANGERFORD was a gentleman, you see. He was a gentleman all over;
and so was his family. He was well born, as the saying is, and that's
worth as much in a man as it is in a horse, so the Widow Douglas said,
and nobody ever denied that she was of the first aristocracy in our town;
and pap he always said it, too, though he warn't no more quality than a
mudcat himself. Col. Grangerford was very tall and very slim, and had a
darkish-paly complexion, not a sign of red in it anywheres; he was clean
shaved every morning all over his thin face, and he had the thinnest kind
of lips, and the thinnest kind of nostrils, and a high nose, and heavy
eyebrows, and the blackest kind of eyes, sunk so deep back that they
seemed like they was looking out of caverns at you, as you may say. His
forehead was high, and his hair was black and straight and hung to his
shoulders. His hands was long and thin, and every day of his life he put
on a clean shirt and a full suit from head to foot made out of linen so
white it hurt your eyes to look at it; and on Sundays he wore a blue
tail-coat with brass buttons on it. He carried a mahogany cane with a
silver head to it. There warn't no frivolishness about him, not a bit,
and he warn't ever loud. He was as kind as he could be--you could feel
that, you know, and so you had confidence. Sometimes he smiled, and it
was good to see; but when he straightened himself up like a liberty-pole,
and the lightning begun to flicker out from under his eyebrows, you
wanted to climb a tree first, and find out what the matter was
afterwards. He didn't ever have to tell anybody to mind their manners
--everybody was always good-mannered where he was. Everybody loved to have
him around, too; he was sunshine most always--I mean he made it seem
like good weather. When he turned into a cloudbank it was awful dark for
half a minute, and that was enough; there wouldn't nothing go wrong again
for a week.
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