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Then there was the “Big Pipe” contractor–a lean man with half-moon whiskers, a red, weather-beaten, knotted face, bushy gray eyebrows, and a clean-shaven mouth that looked when shut like a healed scar. On Sunday this magnate wore a yellow diamond pin and sat in his shirt-sleeves.

There could be found, too, now and then, tilted back on their chairs, two or three of the light-fingered gentry from the race-course near by–pale, consumptive-looking men, with field-glasses hung over their shoulders and looking like bank-clerks, they were so plainly and neatly dressed; as well as some of the less respectable neighbors, besides a few intimate personal friends like myself.

While Muffles shaved and the group about him discussed the several ways–some of them rather shady, I’m afraid–in which they and their constituents earned their daily bread, the stable-boy–he was a street waif, picked up to keep him from starving–served the beverages. Muffles had no Sunday license, of course, but a little thing like that never disturbed Muffles or his friends–not with the Captain of the Precinct as part owner.

My intimacy with Muffles dated from a visit I had made him a year before, when I stopped in one of my sketching-tramps to get something cooling. A young friend of mine–a musician–was with me. Muffles’s garden was filled with visitors: some celebration or holiday had called the people out. Muffles, in expectation, had had the piano tuned and had sent to town for an orchestra of three. The cornet and bass-viol had put in an appearance, but the pianist had been lost in the shuffle.

“De bloke ain’t showed up and we can’t git nothin’ out o’ de fish-horn and de scrape–see?” was the way Muffles put it.

My friend was a graduate of the Conservatoire, an ex-stroke, crew of ’91, owned a pair of shears which he used twice a year in the vaults of a downtown bank, and breakfasted every day at twelve–but none of these things had spoiled him.

“Don’t worry,” he said; “put a prop under your piano-lid and bring me a chair. I’ll work the ivories for you.”

He played till midnight, drank his free beers between each selection, his face as grave as a judge except when he would wink at me out of the corner of his eye to show his intense enjoyment of the whole situation. You can judge of its effect on the audience when I tell you that one young girl in a pink shirt-waist was so overcome with emotion and so sorry for the sad young man who had to earn his living in any such way, that she laid a ten-cent piece on the piano within reach of my friend’s fingers. The smile of intense gratitude which permeated his face–a “thank-God-you-have-saved-me-from-starvation” smile, was part of the evening’s enjoyment. He wears the dime now on his watch-chain; he says it is the only money he ever earned by his music; to which one of his club-friends added, “Or in your life.”

Since that time I have been persona grata to Muffles. Since that time, too, I have studied him at close range: on snowy days–for I like my tramps in winter, with the Bronx a ribbon of white, even though it may be too cold to paint–as well as my outings on Sunday summer mornings when I sit down with his other friends to watch Muffles shave.

On one of these days I found a thin, cadaverous, long-legged, long-armed young man behind the bar. He had yellow-white hair that rested on his head like a window-mop, whitey blue eyes, and a pasty complexion. When he craned his neck in his anxiety to get my order right, I felt that his giraffe throat reached down to his waist-line and that all of it would come out of his collar if I didn’t make up my mind at once “what it should be.”

“Who’s he, Muffles?” I asked.

“Dat’s me new bar-keep. I’ve chucked me job.”