His limbs were not very large, nor his shoulders remarkably broad; but if you knew as much of the muscles as all persons who look at statues and pictures with a critical eye ought to have learned,--if you knew the trapezius, lying diamond-shaped over the back and shoulders like a monk's cowl,--or the deltoid, which caps the shoulder like an epaulette,--or the triceps, which furnishes the calf of the upper arm,--or the hard-knotted biceps,--any of the great sculptural landmarks, in fact,--you would have said there was a pretty show of them, beneath the white satiny skin of Mr.Bernard Langdon.

And if you had seen him, when he had laid down the Indian clubs, catch hold of a leather strap that hung from the beam of the old-fashioned ceiling,--and lift and lower himself over and over again by his left hand alone, you might have thought it a very simple and easy thing to do, until you tried to do it yourself.

Mr.Bernard looked at himself with the eye of an expert.

"Pretty well!" he said;--"not so much fallen off as I expected." Then he set up his bolster in a very knowing sort of way, and delivered two or three blows straight as rulers and swift as winks.
"That will do," he said.

Then, as if determined to make a certainty of his condition, he took a dynamometer from one of the drawers in his old veneered bureau.