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Show 94 WESTERN WILDS. tnonly well muscled, he is yet so compactly built that strangers in-variably pronounce him smaller than he is; and one who first sees him step out of his carriage on Main Street, clad in his short, gray business coat, is apt to speak of him as " dumpy." He measures forty- four inches around the chest, and weighs at least two hundred pounds ; his hands and feet are rather large, his head extremely so, and very broad across the base, sloping thence before and behind toward the crown. With very light or golden hair, a cold, glitter-ing blue eye and a massive under- jaw that shuts like a vice, he has the firmness and vigor that usually consist with such an organiza-tion, and that happy mixture of the sanguine and bilious tempera-ments which makes one easily believe himself a man of destiny. Of the hardiest Vermont stock, he was put up by nature to last a hundred and twenty years, but hardships and the worry of governing have shortened his life from twenty to forty years, and he may die any-where between eighty and a hundred, retaining possession of his fac-ulties and growing more tyrannical and avaricious to the last. Not at all a talented man in the common sense of the word, his power is largely the result of his immense physical potency. His physique is one that makes a man do and dare, and then take the results of that doing and daring as marks of divine favor. Even sneering unbelievers who shake hands with him feel the impress of his magnetic potentiality, nor is it pleasant to face him with the con-sciousness that one is his enemy. Many an apostate can bear wit-ness that long after being convinced that Mormonism was a hollow fraud, which he ought to abandon, and could abandon without danger, he still felt a grievous dread of standing up in the " School of the Prophets" to face the wrath of Brigham Young. To women of the uncultured and impressible sort, such a man is often as fas-cinating as a gentle and purring lion : one with all power in reserve to be exercised only for them and upon their enemies. Even a few non- Mormon women have confessed a mild admiration for this mass of power, and at least two Gentile ladies have so far forgotten them-selves as to write in fulsome praise of a man whose very existence is a standing insult to womanhood. Such respect hath great native power and virile force. Before an audience in sympathy with him he is an effective speaker; he can, by a series of strong, nervous appeals, carry them along to almost any pitch of excitement, and commit them, by voice and vote, to almost any absurdity. Add a ready command of language, albeit the vernacular of an uneducated Vermonter, and rare powers as a |