amused light in his cool gray eye, surveying critically the
half-clothed figures of the puddlers, and the slow swing of
their brawny muscles. He was a stranger in the city,--spending
a couple of months in the borders of a Slave State, to study the
institutions of the South,--a brother-in-law of Kirby's,--
Mitchell. He was an amateur gymnast,--hence his anatomical eye;
a patron, in a blase' way, of the prize-ring; a man who sucked
the essence out of a science or philosophy in an indifferent,
gentlemanly way; who took Kant, Novalis, Humboldt, for what they
were worth in his own scales; accepting all, despising nothing,
in heaven, earth, or hell, but one-idead men; with a temper
yielding and brilliant as summer water, until his Self was
touched, when it was ice, though brilliant still. Such men are
not rare in the States.

As he knocked the ashes from his cigar, Wolfe caught with a
quick pleasure the contour of the white hand, the blood-glow of
a red ring he wore. His voice, too, and that of Kirby's,
touched him like music,--low, even, with chording cadences.
About this man Mitchell hung the impalpable atmosphere belonging
to the thoroughbred gentleman, Wolfe, scraping away the ashes
beside him, was conscious of it, did obeisance to it with his
artist sense, unconscious that he did so.

The rain did not cease. Clarke and the reporter left the mills;
the others, comfortably seated near the furnace, lingered,
smoking and talking in a desultory way. Greek would not have
been more unintelligible to the furnace-tenders, whose presence
they soon forgot entirely. Kirby drew out a newspaper from his
pocket and read aloud some article, which they discussed