Imperial, and a certain German
"professor," a billiard marker, who wore a waistcoat figured with little
designs of the Eiffel Tower, and who was a third owner in a trotting
mare named Tomato Ketchup.

Vandover was now left with only his bonds, his U.S. 4 per cents. These
brought him in but sixty-nine dollars a quarter, or as he had had it
arranged, twenty-three dollars a month. Just at this time, as if by a
miracle, a veritable God from the Machine, Vandover's lawyer, Mr. Field,
found him an opportunity to earn some money. For the first and only time
in his life Vandover knew what it was to work for a living. The work
that Field secured for him was the work of painting those little
pictures on the lacquered surface of iron safes, those little oval
landscapes between the lines of red and gold lettering--landscapes,
rugged gorges, ocean steamships under all sail, mountain lakes with
sailboats careening upon their surfaces, the boat indicated by two
little triangular dabs of Chinese white, one for the sail itself and the
other for its reflection in the water. Sometimes even he was called upon
to paint other little pictures upon the sides of big express wagons--two
horses, one white and the other bay, galloping very free in an open
field, their manes and tails flying, or a bulldog, very savage, sitting
upon a green and black safe, or the head of a mastiff with a spiked
collar about his neck.

What with the pay for this sort of work and the interest of his bonds,
Vandover managed to lead a haphazard sort of life, living about in cheap
lodging-houses and cheap restaurants. But he was never more than a
second-class workman, and he was so irregular that he could never be
depended upon.

The moment he began to paint again--even to paint such pitiful little
pictures as these--the same familiar experience repeated itself, the
unwillingness of his fingers, their failure to rightly interpret his
ideas, the resulting crudity of his work, the sudden numbness in his
brain, the queer, tense sensation behind his eyes. But Vandover had long
since become accustomed to these symptoms and would not have minded them
at this time had it not been that they were occasionally followed by a
nervous twitching and jerking of his whole arm, so that sometimes he
could not hold the brush steady a minute at a time.

For two years he had drifted about the city, living now here and now
there, a real hand-to-mouth existence, sinking a little lower each