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They had wine, and there was much merriment. This abandonment was in contrast to the serious, almost dark spirit of a party at another table. This was composed of men entirely. I had never seen such faces before. Their hair was long. They wore goatees. They were strangely dressed. They talked with a broad accent. Excitement and anger rose in their voices. They were denouncing President Jackson.
No, there is a godless grace, and snap, and style about a born and bred New-Yorker which mere clothing cannot effect. This morning, struck into the region of full goatees sometimes accompanied by a mustache, but only occasionally.
Beards three years old; goatees that would have graced a Chamois of the Alps; imperials that Count D'Orsay would have envied; and love-curls and man-of-war ringlets that would have measured, inch for inch, with the longest tresses of The Fair One with the Golden Locks all went by the board!
The leanness! the osseosity! the grandiloquent whiskers parted in the middle! the mustachios! the goatees! the fat, Hoti-like stomachs! the protuberant knees! the thin arms! the bald or semi-bald pates! the spectacles or horn glasses or pince-nezes! laid aside a few moments later, as the exercises began.
At first it offends one to see certain pontiffs with mustaches and imperials and goatees; but, if one reflects that so they wore them in life, one perceives right in it; only when one comes to earlier or later popes, bearded in medieval majority or shaven in the decent modern fashion, one can endure those others only as part of the prevailing baroque of the church.
There was the same roistering and sprawling crowd; the same loudness and profanity; the same abundance of whisky and its intemperate indulgence; the same barbaric hilarity of negroes, driven and cursed. And now many goatees, and much talk of politics, of Whigs and Democrats. St. Louis was languid, weary and old. The buildings had an air of decay.
Alighting we passed through a small boozing ken, where a frowzy woman presided over a bar, serving drinks to smocked marketmen, and at the rear descended a steep flight of stone steps. At the foot of the stairs we came on two gendarmes who sat side by side on a wooden bench, having apparently nothing else to do except to caress their goatees and finger their swords.
Two or three were seamed across with cracks, hastily recalled sentences to destruction; and here and there remained tokens of a draughtsman's over-generous struggle to confer upon some of the smooth-shaven faces additional manliness in the shape of sweeping moustaches, long beards, goatees, mutton-chops, and, in the case of one gentleman of a blond, delicate and tenor-like beauty, neck-whiskers; decorations in many instances so deeply and damply pencilled that subsequent attempts at erasure had failed of great success.
I learn that Horace Greeley is his full name, and he comes in for a berating at the hands of a man with one of the characteristic goatees that I first observed at Castle Garden. The Whigs! I had always associated this party with latitudinarian principles. Now I hear it called a centralist party, a monarchist party.
What with long whiskers and venerable beards, then, of every variety of cut Charles the Fifth's and Aurelian's and endless goatees and imperials; and what with abounding locks, our crew seemed a company of Merovingians or Long-haired kings, mixed with savage Lombards or Longobardi, so called from their lengthy beards.
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