e 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 fe