The passengers came trooping down the gangway, with an odd buoyancy of step
caused by the steep incline, and Jack, for all his expectancy, had eyes,
appreciative and critical, for the procession of his country-people. Stout,
short men, embodying purely economic functions, with rudimentary features,
slightly embossed, as it were, upon pouch-like faces. Thin, young men,
whose lean countenances had somewhat the aspect of steely machinery, apt
for swift, ruthless, utilitarian processes. Bloodless old men, many of
whom looked like withered, weary children adorned with whitened hair.
The average manhood of America, with its general air of cheap and hasty
growth, but varied here and there by a higher type; an athletic collegian,
auspiciously Grecian in length of limb, width of brow, deep placidity
of eye; varied by a massive senatorial head or so, tolerant, humorous,
sagacious; varied by a stalwart Westerner, and by the weedier scholar,
sensitive, self-conscious, too much of the spiritual and too little of the
animal in the meager body and over-intelligent face.

There was a certain discrepancy, in dress and bodily well-being, between
the feminine and the masculine portion of the procession; many of the heavy
matrons, wide-hipped, well-corseted, benignant and commanding of mien, were
ominously suggestive, followed as they were by their fragile husbands,
of the female spider and her doomed, inferior, though necessary, mate.
The young girls of the happier type resembled Imogen Upton in grace, in
strength, in calm and in assurance; the less fortunate were sharp, sallow,
anxious-eyed; and the children were either rosy, well-mannered, and
confident, or ill-mannered, over-mature, but also, always, confident.

Highly equipped with every graceful quality of his race, not a touch of the
male spider about him, Eddy's head appeared at last, proud, delicate and
strong. His mother, carrying a small dog, was on his arm, and, as she