He who should have enjoyed the privilege of looking upon Mr. Bernard Langdon the next morning, when his toilet was about half finished, would have had a very pleasant gratuitous exhibition.  First he buckled the strap of his trousers pretty tightly.  Then he took up a pair of heavy dumb-bells, and swung them for a few minutes; then two great “Indian clubs,” with which he enacted all sorts of impossible-looking feats.  His limbs were not very large, nor his shoulders remarkably broad; but if you knew as much of the muscles as all persons who look at statues and pictures with a critical eye ought to have learned,—­if you knew the trapezius, lying diamond-shaped over the back and shoulders like a monk’s cowl,—­or the deltoid, which caps the shoulder like an epaulette,—­or the triceps, which furnishes the calf of the upper arm,—­or the hard-knotted biceps,—­any of the great sculptural landmarks, in fact,—­you would have said there was a pretty show of them, beneath the white satiny skin of Mr. Bernard Langdon.  And if you had seen him, when he had laid down the Indian clubs, catch hold of a leather strap that hung from the beam of the old-fashioned ceiling,—­and lift and lower himself over and over again by his left hand alone, you might have thought it a very simple and easy thing to do, until you tried to do it yourself.  Mr. Bernard looked at himself with the eye of an expert.  “Pretty well!” he said;—­“not so much fallen off as I expected.”  Then he set up his bolster in a very knowing sort of way, and delivered two or three blows straight as rulers and swift as winks.  “That will do,” he said.  Then, as if determined to make a certainty of his condition, he took a dynamometer from one of the drawers in his old veneered bureau.  First he squeezed it with his two hands.  Then he placed it on the floor and lifted, steadily, strongly.  The springs creaked and cracked; the index swept with a great stride far up into the high figures of the scale; it was a good lift.  He was satisfied.  He sat down on the edge of his bed and looked at his cleanly-shaped arms.  “If I strike one of those boobies, I am afraid I shall spoil him,” he said.  Yet this young man, when weighed with his class at the college, could barely turn one hundred and forty-two pounds in the scale,—­not a heavy weight, surely; but some of the middle weights, as the present English champion, for instance, seem to be of a far finer quality of muscle than the bulkier fellows.

The master took his breakfast with a good appetite that morning, but was perhaps rather more quiet than usual.  After breakfast he went up-stairs and put, on a light loose frock, instead of that which he commonly wore, which was a close-fitting and rather stylish one.  On his way to school he met Alminy Cutterr, who happened to be walking in the other direction.  “Good-morning, Miss Cutter,” he said; for she and another young lady had been introduced to him, on a former occasion, in the usual phrase of