It was a curious transformation, and about the most incongruous spectacle I had ever seen. Here was a man with gold eye-glasses, a diamond ring, thin white hands, patent leather boots, with greasy overalls. It was an earnest mechanic engrafted upon a Broadway exquisite. "Do my eyes deceive me?" "They do not. It is I, Delancy. Not the old Delancy, but an entirely new one. I have now something to live for." "Why have you quit the hotel?" "Because I want to associate with my fellows. I am living with them. I have been admitted as one of them, and they all know me as well as though I had been born one of them, which I wish to Heaven I had. I can eat something now, and their beer--well, with a lot of good fellows it lays all over the champagne I have always paid for. You see I have made up my mind to demonstrate to these ignoramuses that a piece of iron can be forged to any shape, with any depression in it desirable, and that these men at the lathes and shapers waste ninety per cent. of their time. We have got to have machinery, and we want it cheap. I have something to live for. I shall be a machinist." [Sidenote: A USEFUL MAN AT LAST.] The man had actually bribed the master of the works to accept him as an apprentice, and he had made an exceedingly good one. He was at the works at the regular hour, and stayed as late as the latest. And he developed wonderful genius in the way of mechanics, and was in a fair way to arrive at a high position in the business. The workmen idolized him. He delighted to go with them evenings to the cafés they frequented, to be a little king among them; he helped the sick and unfortunate; he took some interest in their concerns, and they in turn did everything possible to acquaint him with the practical part of the trade. "They are a much better lot," he said, "than the leeches who used to hang upon me." He invited me to dine with him one day, and the amount of coarse food he could consume--this man who had not had an appetite for twenty years--was something wonderful. For the first time in his life, he declared, he was absolutely happy. He had something to do. Before he had been in the shop a week he showed the master how the iron bar could be forged to the shape required, and how two-thirds of the time at the machine could be saved, and he succeeded in having his system introduced. He vows that he will stick to it till he has learned his trade, then go home to New York and start the most perfect machine shop on the continent, and that, moreover, he will be perfectly happy therein. He is not _ennuied_ any more, for he has found something to do. There are others who would do well to follow his example. CHAPTER XXXII. CHILLON AND OTHER POINTS.