u could have free ingress with a
companion or two, and time and the mood to explore the whole of its
ramifications and arrangements, you must have concluded that the
designer of so much that was hideously obvious and so much that was
mysteriously obscure was a most extraordinary example of viciousness,
ability, purpose, and musicianship. You must have been staggered at
passing from a room containing a grand piano and a bust of Beethoven to
find yourself in a little operating-theatre such as any eminent surgeon
might wish to be at work in, to find beyond this a small but excellently
appointed gymnasium; above this, to be reached only by climbing a
knotted rope, a long room, lighted from above, containing
drawing-tables, many cases of drawing-instruments, and a host of
workman-like designs and specifications. Thence you might pass, still
wondering, into an apartment of soft divans, thick rags, and open
fireplace, a smell of incense, double windows and double doors.

Or you might descend by stairs or polished poles to the cellar under the
hat factory, and find yourself, prying into the most obscure corner and
lighting matches for guidance, confronted by the door of a mightily
strong safety vault, the knobs of the combination lock bright and easily
turned. And you might say: "Well, it's either the house of a man whose
scheme of life is utterly beyond my comprehension, or of a madman."

VII

Of the two persons who left their homes this morning, the legless
beggar, owing to having ridden part of the way in a street-car, was the
first to reach the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Washington
Square, whence the last rear-guard of fashion in old New York retreats
before the advance-pickets of the encroaching slums, like a stag before
a pack of hounds. Here he ensconced himself, placed his tin cup on the
top of his organ, together with the few pairs of shoe-laces which
proclaimed him a merchant within rather than a beggar without the law,
and proceeded to enliven the still quiet neighborhood with the
dreadfully strained measure of Verdi's "Miserere." He turned the handles
of the little organ fitfully, so that now the strains of sorrow arose at
such long intervals as hardly to be connected with one another, and now
all huddled and jumbled like notes in a barbaric quickstep, and as he
played he addressed his instrument in a quiet, cruel voice.

A house-maid opened a window in the servants' wing of No. 1 Fifth
Avenue.