no word, made no single gesture.... The tin-type photograph was produced.... "Yep, I seen dat fellar," grinned the woman in her "tough" bowery talk they all affected in the Tenderloin. "A high flier ... raining in London, too"--a gibe at the "English" habit of turning up one's trousers--with a stream of local slang, oaths, filthy hints and repeated demands to "put 'em up," meaning drinks. Then a whispered growl from the old German "Nichts! ... sie luegt ... los mit ihr!" A further stream of lurid insults ... and she was gone, while another sidled up a little later. They all knew German, these women. Was not New York the third biggest German city, qua population, in the Empire? Few, as a matter of fact, were American. Barring the mulattos and quadroon girls, to say nothing of the negresses, the majority were French, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, Dutch or some polyglot mixture not even the British Museum could define....
Never did the old German's kindness prove itself as in these hideous night-watches. Apart from all questions of trouble and expense, he was obliged to take extra doses of morphine to meet the charge upon his system, at a time, too, when he was struggling to reduce the quantity. Compared to what he did, even the fact that he gave the poison to others, possibly to his own child among them, seemed negligible. Not only did he accompany me during the chase, spending hours in low, suffocating dens of beastliness, walking the wind-swept streets in mid-winter, suffering insults and acute discomfort, but also he bestowed practical care and kindness on me during the day, providing me with food (I was in no state even to pose in the studios at the time), and even suggesting that I should fit up a bed in his workshop where he kept the lathe and made the chessmen. All this, too, from an old man, himself in deep misery, and on the losing side of a fight far more terrible than I ever knew or imagined, a fight, he then realized already, was to end before very long in failure, which meant death. The strange, broken old being,
twisted and distorted though his nervous system was by
