‘Just then,’ said Minna, taking up her own narrative again, ‘while I was thinking about all this, my eye fell upon an engine and tender in the siding. There was the engine-driver, seated on a log of wood, eating his supper; there was a boy, and there was a young man who was the stoker, and they were talking. You see, I understand what they say. I am better off than so many people who come here. There was some discussion about coals being loaded into the tender. Someone who ought to have been there then, helping, had not come, and there was some haste. Suddenly this young man sprang up, seized a shovel, and fell to upon the work. He got hot, he threw his shirt off, and worked with a sort of fury. The sweat poured from him. The boy was working no less vigorously, seizing the baskets and emptying them into the coal place on the tender. I wished I could help them. They were splendid. Then all at once this fellow stopped short, wiped his brow with his hand, and stood still as you see him here. As he looked then, it seemed to me that his pose was almost classical. For all his energy, there was real rest and repose in the attitude. There flashed into my mind a recollection of that figure of the ‘Chariot-driver’ in the _Sala della Biga_ at the Vatican--you remember?’ He nodded. ‘A handsome lad, isn’t he? in all his elegant trappings, even if it isn’t very precious as a work of art. He stands there with great calm and self-possession, looking cool and comfortable; but all the same one knows, one feels, that sometimes he must have had to exert himself pretty hard, guiding his team of four or six, perhaps, or racing in grim earnest round the amphitheatre, amidst the cheers and howls of the greens and blues. He did not always look so cool and comfortable. I don’t know how my thoughts followed one another, but suddenly there it was--the connection, the analogue--that marble boy in the Vatican, and these, the real chariot-drivers of to-day, with their surroundings. I had always felt that there are things to-day as suited to be put into marble or bronze, and to live as records of our times, as there were in those other days which we study with such interest and delight. Only I had never been quite able to hit upon the exact thing that I wanted. Here it was, I thought--one instance of it, at any rate. The thought in my mind was a grand and beautiful one. I fell to work at once, in a fever of delight; then came doubts and difficulties, and that is all the result--all there is to show for it.’ She looked dejectedly at the figure.