Here he stopped, evidently by a violent exertion, and shook hands with each of the others, and afforded such a view of his personal appearance as satisfied the individual of the solitary optic, and his companion of the vegetable leg, that they had fallen in with another original--added to the fact, with which they were already well acquainted, that he had a powerful, though not very controllable voice. Other things about the newly-discovered person showed him to be a man far above, or below, or, at least, differing from, the common run of people one meets in a railroad-car. His face, had it been visible to the naked eye, through the surrounding thicket of hair, might have passed for good-looking; but the hirsute crop which flourished about his head was something really remarkable. If each hair had possessed as many roots as a scrub oak sapling, and had grown the wrong way, with the roots out, there couldn't have been more; or if each individual hair had been grafted with a score of thrifty shoots, and each of them, in turn, had given off a multitude of sandy-colored sprouts, and each separate sprout had taken an unconquerable aversion to every other sprout, and was striving to grow in an independent direction of its own, there wouldn't have been a more abundant display of hair, growing towards a greater variety of hitherto unknown points of compass. It was so long that it concealed his neck and shoulders, and you could only suppose he had a throat from the certainty that he had a mouth. And even the mouth was in its turn ornamented with an overhanging moustache, of a subdued rat-color, which also was long, running down the corners of the jaw, and joining the rest of the beard on the neck below. A shirt-collar, turned down over his coat, was dimly visible whenever the wind was strong enough to lift the superincumbent hair. Taking into account the physical curtailments of Overdale's companions, the trio consisted of about two men and a half. Dennis now proposed that they should go on with the song, he volunteering to sing the verses, and requesting the reinforcements to show their strength when he said, "_Chorius_"--the mention of music excited Overdale's harmonic devil again, and he was obliged to twist his neckerchief until he was black in the face, to choke down an embryo, "tooral," which ran to his lips before the cue came, and seemed to insist upon an immediate and stormy exit; by dint of the most suffocating exertions he succeeded in keeping back the musical torrent until the end of the verse, when it broke forth with a vengeance. And then Wagstaff struck in, and Dennis took a long breath, and _he_ struck in; and they waked up a couple of children, and _they_ struck in; and Dennis put his wooden leg on the tail of a dog, and _he_ struck in; and the locomotive put on the final touch, by shrieking with a frightful yell, as if it had boiled down into one, the squalls of eleven hundred freshly-spanked babies.