Here, too, was raw material organized:  a fly-wheel, large enough to keep the knobbiest of asteroids revolving without a wabble; a cross-head, cross-tail, and piston-rod, to help a great sea-going steamer breast the waves; a light walking-beam, to whirl the paddles of a fast boat on the river; and other members of machines, only asking to be put together and vivified by steam and they would go at their work with a will.

From the black rafters overhead hung the heavy folds of a dim atmosphere, half dust, half smoke.  A dozen sunbeams, forcing their way through the grimy panes of the grimy upper windows, found this compound quite palpable and solid, and they moulded out of it a series of golden bars set side by side aloft, like the pipes of an organ out of its perpendicular.

Wade grew indignant, as he looked about him and saw so much good stuff and good force wasting for want of a little will and skill to train the force and manage the stuff.  He abhorred bankruptcy and chaos.

“All they want here is a head,” he thought.

He shook his own.  The brain within was well developed with healthy exercise.  It filled its case, and did not rattle like a withered kernel, or sound soft like a rotten one.  It was a vigorous, muscular brain.  The owner felt that he could trust it for an effort, as he could his lungs for a shout, his legs for a leap, or his fist for a knock-down argument.

At the tap of the bell, the “bad lot” of men came together.  They numbered more than two hundred, though the Foundry was working short.  They had been notified that “that gonoph of a Whiffler was kicked out, and a new feller was in, who looked cranky enough, and wanted to see ’em and tell ’em whether he was a damn’ fool or not.”

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 warpaint.  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 housewives 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.