Page:How to Get Strong (1899).pdf/403

 brought his weight down on his heels with a force that shook the court-room; he paused for two or three seconds, threw back his head, swept the jury with a terrific glance, and violently inhaled his breath through his nostrils with a snuffing that was heard all over the court-room; his weird eyes glared like a maniac's; his wrinkled face assumed a hundred unnatural corrugations; in short, his speech tore his frame, and his body was convulsed like that of the Delphic priestess in her moments of inspiration. All this seems very ridiculous in the description. It is not singular that it sometimes excited derision. But derision was short-lived. Once when a party to the suit in progress laughed at Choate's extravagance the advocate crushed him by advancing on him with a thundering 'let those laugh who win.

Choate's personal appearance was as remarkable as his oratory. Above six feet in height, with a powerful chest and shoulders, a gaunt frame, huge hands and feet; a rolling, lumbering sort of gait, a bilious, coffee-colored complexion; his face deeply corrugated with profound wrinkles and hollows and seamed with powerful lines; his head deep, rather than wide, and completely covered with luxuriant black curly hair, scarcely tinged with gray at the day of his death; mouth large, and lips thin and tremulous; his eyes large, deep-set, and black, with a weird, far-away expression in quiet; but a terrible burning intensity in excitement a face noticeable in a throng of a thousand, with intellect looking out at every point;—a most haggard, woe-begone, fortune-telling countenance; his person arrayed in slouching, ill-fitting garments, including always several coats of various and indescribable hues, which he doffed or donned in the progress of a cause, according to the amount of perspiration which he was secreting; and a cravat which has been said "to meet in an indescribable tie, which seems like a fortuitous concurrence of original atoms. He possessed a wonderful capacity for labor