So all hands collected from the different parts of the Foundry to see the head.
They came up with easy and somewhat swaggering bearing, — a good many roughs, with here and there a ruffian. Several, as they approached, swung and tossed, for mere overplus of strength, the sledges with which they had been tapping at the bald shiny pates of their anvils. Several wielded their long pokers like lances.
Grimy chaps, all with their faces streaked, like Blackfeet in their war-paint. Their hairy chests showed, where some men parade elaborate shirt-bosoms. Some had their sleeves pushed up to the elbow to exhibit their compact flexors and extensors. Some had rolled their flannel up to the shoulder, above the bulging muscles of the upper arm. They wore aprons tied about the neck, like the bibs of our childhood, — or about the waist, like the coquettish articles which young house-wives affect. But there was no coquetry in these great flaps of leather or canvas, and they were besmeared and rust-stained quite beyond any bib that ever suffered under bread-and-molasses or mud-pie treatment.
They lounged and swaggered up, and stood at ease, not without rough grace, in a sinuous line, coiled and knotted like a snake.
Ten feet back stood the new Hercules who was to take down that Hydra’s two hundred crests of insubordination.
They inspected him, and he them as coolly. He
