pper body, nude
to the hips, showed the brawny development of an athlete, began to speak
to Frederick and Peter.

"What won't a man do to earn his bit of daily bread!" he said. "I am from
Pirna"--he pronounced it "Berna," speaking in a round Saxon dialect--"and
I tell you, it's no joke for fellows like me in this damned New York. At
first I earned my living as a professional strong man. Then my boss
failed, and I had to give up my outfit, my iron bars and my weights and
everything I needed for my job. I can carry twelve hundred pounds on my
stomach."

Ritter sent word asking the gentlemen to come to his private studio. They
passed through a room in which a stately young lady was working without
a model at an almost completed portrait bust in clay. In the next room,
three or four marble-cutters were making a great noise hammering and
chiselling imperturbably, without glancing up, at marble blocks of
various sizes. From this room, a cast-iron circular stairway led up to
a narrow skylight studio, where Bonifacius Ritter received Frederick and
Peter.

It was a delight merely to behold the young master in his slimness and
elegance. When the men entered, he removed his left hand from the pocket
of his light smock, tossed away his burning cigarette, and greeted them
with evident pleasure, blushing like a girl. He ushered them into a small
room adjoining, lighted by a single window of antique stained glass from
a French church. The low ceiling was coffered in weathered oak, and the
walls were panelled in wood to a height of about six feet. A heavy oak
table with benches on three sides took up nearly half the length of the
room. The front of the room was partially blocked up by a genuine
Nuremberg stove with the precious Delft tiles of antique green glaze
testifying to the wonderful old potter's art. Willy Snyders had chanced
upon the beautiful Renaissance piece in a shop near the wharf, and had
succeeded in buying it for Ritter for only one hundred dollars.

"Here's a comfortable corner of the Fatherland," said Ritter. "Willy
planned it all, collected all the stuff, and attended to the entire
furnishing."

The university student in Frederick, the thorough German in him was
surprised and delighted. Though the room looked like the cell of a St.
Jerome, or, better still, the study of an Erasmus, it nevertheless
resembled in its least details the dim sanctum of a German _Weinstube_,
and all the more so when a young man in a b