So, like as the insect, emerging from the chrysalis, takes the color of the leaf or bark to which it clings, Bob grew more and more like unto the soulless machinery humming round him. If whispered to, he made no response. When toward evening his poor back would feel weary, no look of impatience revealed itself on his countenance. If ever he heaved a sigh, no ears heard it, not even his own; and the foreman declared that he was a model boy for all the other boys to imitate――so silent, so industrious, so heartily co-operating with the wheels and cog-wheels, boiler, valves, and steam; in fact, he was the most valuable piece in the whole complicated machinery. Bob was really a study. There are children who look forward to happy days to come; who often, too, throw their mind’s eye backward on the Christmas last gone by. This Bob never did. His past had no Santa Claus, his present had none, his future had none. It were difficult to say what life did appear to him, as day after day he bent over his task. Mayhap he never indulged in thoughts about himself――what he had been, what he was, what he might become. Certainly, if we may judge by the vacant, leaden look into which his features ere long crystallized, Bob was indeed what the foreman said――a bit of the machinery. And more and more akin to it he grew as time rolled by. Bob had never beheld it except in motion; and on Sundays, when he was forced to remain idle, his arm would ever and anon start off on a wild, crazy whirl; round and round and round it would go; whereupon the other children would laugh and shout: “Hi! ho! Look at Flywheel Bob!” The child’s fame spread. In the course of time Richard Goodman, the owner of the factory, heard of him. This gentleman, be it known, was subject to the gout; at least, he gave it that name, which sounded better than rheumatism, for it smacked of family, of gentle birth; though, verily, if such an ailment might be communicated through a proboscis, there was not enough old Madeira in his veins to have given a mosquito the gout.