I saw a little mite sitting on a doorstep in a Soho slum one night, and I shall never forget the look that the gas-lamp showed me on its
wizen face--a look of dull despair, as if from the squalid court the vista of its own squalid life had risen, ghostlike, and struck its heart dead with horror.
By dint of angling with great dexterity and patience, under the direction of both her parents, my handsome sister Annabella had succeeded in catching an eligible husband, in the shape of a
wizen, miserly, mahogany-colored man, turned fifty, who had made a fortune in the West Indies.
His
wizen little cheeks were beginning to shrink into hollows, his frail little figure had already contracted a slight stoop.
"My goodness me!" cried Monica, the smaller, the drier, and the more
wizened of the pair.
Veiling his clear-cut, lean face in a thin layer of a hard, high cloud, I have seen him, like a
wizened robber sheik of the sea, hold up large caravans of ships to the number of three hundred or more at the very gates of the English Channel.
He was old, too,
wizened with age, and the hair on his face was gray.
Chanticleer himself, though stalking on two stilt-like legs, with the dignity of interminable descent in all his gestures, was hardly bigger than an ordinary partridge; his two wives were about the size of quails; and as for the one chicken, it looked small enough to be still in the egg, and, at the same time, sufficiently old, withered,
wizened, and experienced, to have been founder of the antiquated race.
"He's terrible," said Emma Jane, "but awfully
wizened and small."
I called to mind the theory that an innate physical deficiency is seldom without its moral counterpart, and I wondered how far this would apply to the deaf-mute at my side, who was ill-grown,
wizened, and puny into the bargain.
Every nincompoop in the land rushed into free print, floating their
wizened little egos into the public eye on the surge of Brissenden's greatness.
But lo and behold, Mistress Blythe, Henry looks up at me, with those bright old black eyes of his in his
wizened face and says, says he, `Tell me something I don't know, Jim Boyd, if you want to give me information.
She was the abject wreck of a beautiful woman,
wizened, prematurely aged.