And lo! in the middle of all the din,
Not seeming to care a single pin,
  For a prospect so volcanic,
A Stranger steps abruptly in,
  Of an aspect rather Satanic: 
And he looks with a grin at those Cyclops grim,
Who stare and grin again at him
  With wondrous little panic.

Then up to the Furnace the Stranger goes,
Eager to thaw his ears and nose,
And warm his frozen fingers and toes—­
  While each succeeding minute,
Hotter and hotter the Smithy grows,
      And seems to declare,
      By a fiercer glare,
On wall, roof, floor, and everywhere,
  It knows the Devil is in it!

      Still not a word
      Is utter’d or heard,
But the beetle-brow’d Foreman nods and winks,
Much as a shaggy old Lion blinks,
      And makes a shift
      To impart his drift
To a smoky brother, who, joining the links,
Hints to a third the thing he thinks;
      And whatever it be,
      They all agree
  In smiling with faces full of glee,
As if about to enjoy High Jinks.

What sort of tricks they mean to play
By way of diversion, who can say,
Of such ferocious and barbarous folk,
Who chuckled, indeed, and never spoke
Of burning Robert the Jaeger to coke,
Except as a capital practical joke! 
  Who never thought of Mercy, or heard her,
Or any gentle emotion felt;
But hard as the iron they had to melt,
  Sported with Danger and romp’d with Murder!

      Meanwhile the Stranger—­
      The Brocken Ranger,
Besides another and hotter post,
  That renders him not averse to a roast,—­
Creeping into the Furnace almost,
Has made himself as warm as a toast—­
  When, unsuspicious of any danger,
And least of all of any such maggot
As treating a body like a faggot,
All at once he is seized and shoven
      In pastime cruel,
      Like so much fuel,
Headlong into the blazing oven!

  In he goes! with a frightful shout
Mock’d by the rugged ruffianly band,
As round the Furnace mouth they stand,
Bar, and shovel, and ladle in hand,
  To hinder their Butt from crawling out,
  Who making one fierce attempt, but vain,
      Receives such a blow
      From Red-Beard’s crow
As crashes the skull and gashes the brain,
And blind, and dizzy, and stunn’d with pain,
  With merely an interjectional “oh!”
Back he rolls in the flames again.

“Ha!  Ha!  Ho!  Ho!” That second fall
Seerns the very best joke of all,
      To judge by the roar,
      Twice as loud as before,
That fills the Hut, from the roof to the floor,
And flies a league or two out of the door,
Up the mountains and over the moor—­
But scarcely the jolly echoes they wake
      Have well begun
      To take up the fun,
Ere the shaggy Felons have cause to quake,
  And begin to feel that the deed they have done,
  Instead of being a pleasant one,
Was a very great error—­and no mistake.