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Every boy and almost every man has longed to ride on a locomotive, and has dreamed of holding the throttle-lever and of feeling the great machine move under him in answer to his will. Many of us have protested vigorously that we wanted to become grimy, hard-working firemen for the sake of having to do with the "iron horse."
He had another long look at himself in the glass, and then descended whistling to breakfast. This time the tune was "Macgregors' Gathering," and the sound of it stirred the grimy lips of a man outside who was delivering coals himself a Macgregor to follow suit. Mr McCunn was a very fountain of music that morning.
That was the attitude of that grimy individualism born in "barefoot square" or in "slab alley," in the land of smoke and flame and "rusty rivers." And the future? Well, the voice of the French priest and of those ministers of his own and other faiths that have followed in his footsteps is still heard there crying of the world to come.
Sotillo had seized the riding-whip, and stood with his arm lifted up. For a word, for one little word, he felt he would have knelt, cringed, grovelled on the floor before the drowsy, conscious stare of those fixed eyeballs starting out of the grimy, dishevelled head that drooped very still with its mouth closed askew. The colonel ground his teeth with rage and struck.
Time passed quickly, the train rushed farther and farther north, and by six o'clock on that warm, sunshiny afternoon we were in the grimy city of Glasgow, from whence we went on to a still grimier quarter, Greenock, where we put up for the night.
Madame poured for her guest, and he drank a long draught of the Burgundy, then begged, holding forth his grimy hands, that he might mend his appearance before sitting down to eat. He was led away and valeted by Jacques, and when he returned he had removed from his person the last vestige of the rough handling he had received.
With his shoes almost covered by the muddy water, his hands black and grimy, his brown face splashed with mud, leaning on his shovel he stood and talked from the deep ditch, not much more than head and shoulders visible above it. It seemed a voice from the very earth, speaking of education, change, and possibilities.
Freddy lay on the Gym floor, pillowed on Dan's jacket, and reviving under the ministration of a sturdy hand and a very wet and grimy pocket-handkerchief. "What did you go tumbling off like that for?" asked Dan indignantly as the "angel eyes" of his patient opened. "Don't know," murmured Freddy, faintly. "I told you to stand steady, and you didn't, you jumped!" said Dan.
Then he jerked a grimy thumb in the direction of the back room. "Why, the dame in there, cryin' into her absinthe, is Charley's girl. She's a queen straight as they make 'em, if she does work the shops now and then and Charley was fixin' to hook up with her next month, preacher-fashion, and settle down. Now he gets the office and skips without a word to her, and she's all broke up over it!"
Listening at the crack of the door for a moment and finding they were not pursued, he stood over the limp body, lifted it in his arms, laid it on a pile of sails, and ran to the rear of the cellar for a bucket standing under a grimy window, scarcely visible in the gloom, now that the door was shut.