Frederick agreed, again begging his friend not to refer to his nervous attack. "It was very astute of me, or of the wire-puller above us, to postpone my fit until the very moment you were with me," he said. Several times within the next few hours, Schmidt had occasion to be struck by Frederick's evident belief in predestination and the superstition that clung to him from his crossing of the Atlantic. The street that Bonifacius Ritter's studios were on adjoined Central Park. In the first room, a man in a round paper cap of his own making was at work taking a plaster cast of a man. His cap and his smock and trousers, or as much of his trousers as showed from under his smock and above his slippers, were covered with hardened daubs of clay. Death-masks, casts of antique statues, and anatomical studies of the human body, in whole or part, hung on all the walls. When the workman left the room to announce the visitors the model, whose upper 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.