Young Kirby looked curiously around, as if seeing the faces of his hands for the first time.

“They’re bad enough, that’s true.  A desperate set, I fancy.  Eh, Clarke?”

The overseer did not hear him.  He was talking of net profits just then,—­giving, in fact, a schedule of the annual business of the firm to a sharp peering little Yankee, who jotted down notes on a paper laid on the crown of his hat:  a reporter for one of the city-papers, getting up a series of reviews of the leading manufactories.  The other gentlemen had accompanied them merely for amusement.  They were silent until the notes were finished, drying their feet at the furnaces, and sheltering their faces from the intolerable heat.  At last the overseer concluded with—­“I believe that is a pretty fair estimate, Captain.”

“Here, some of you men!” said Kirby, “bring up those boards.  We may as well sit down, gentlemen, until the rain is over.  It cannot last much longer at this rate.”

“Pig-metal,”—­mumbled the reporter,—­“um!—­coal facilities,—­um!—­hands employed, twelve hundred,—­bitumen,—­um!—­’all right, I believe, Mr. Clarke;—­sinking-fund,—­what did you say was your sinking-fund?”

“Twelve hundred hands?” said the stranger, the young man who had first spoken.  “Do you control their votes, Kirby?”

“Control?  No.”  The young man smiled complacently.  “But my father brought seven hundred votes to the polls for his candidate last November.  No force-work, you understand,—­only a speech or two, a hint to form themselves into a society, and a bit of red and blue bunting to make them a flag.  The Invincible Roughs,—­I believe that is their name.  I forget the motto:  ‘Our country’s hope,’ I think.”

There was a laugh.  The young man talking to Kirby sat with an 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 thorough-bred 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.