boys. It
required no _immediate_ notice.

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 shoulders 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