The Colonel's dress was completed by drab overgaiters and poorly draped trousers of the same once-delicate hue.

Upon his bald head, which was high and peaked, like Sir Walter Scott's, he carried a silk hat in an inferior state of preservation.
When he began to drink it was his custom to repair at once to a barber and submit to having his side-whiskers trimmed fastidiously.

Sober, he seemed to feel little pride of person, and his whiskers at such a time merely called attention somewhat unprettily to his lack of a chin.

His other possessions were an ebony walking stick with a gold head and what he referred to in moments of expansion as his "library." This consisted of a copy of the Revised Statutes, a directory of Cincinnati, Ohio, for the year 1867, and two volumes of Patent Office reports.
At the time of which I speak the Colonel had long been sober, and the day that Solon Denney completed those mysterious negotiations with him he was as far from conventional standards of the beautiful as I remember to have seen him.
The guise of Solon's subtlety, the touch of his iron hand in a glove of softest velvet, had been in this wise: he had pointed out to the Colonel that there were richer fields of endeavor to the west of us; newer, larger towns, fitter abodes for a man of his parts; communities which had honors and emoluments to lavish upon the worthy,--prizes which it would doubtless never be in our poor power to bestow.
Potts was stirred by all this, but he was not blinded to certain disadvantages,--"a stranger in a strange land," etc., while in Little Arcady he had already "made himself known." But, suggested Solon, with a ready wit, if the stranger were to go fortified with certificates of character from the leading citizens of his late home?
This was a thing to consider.

Potts reflected more favorably; but still he hesitated.