"Gosh!" said he, "is it as late as that?" He stood up and knocked the ashes out of his pipe against the red bricks of the hearth. "By the way, I don't know your name." I told him. "Mine," said he, "is Fred Demmler." Explaining that I already had a friend named Fred I asked if he had any objection to being called Fritz. "None whatever." "Fritz it is, then." And Fritz it remained. II A once-aristocratic residential street now reduced to a teaming thoroughfare; pedestal to Beacon Hill; narrow, ill-paved, spattered with mud to the second story, double row of tall brick town houses, where Thackeray and Dickens were once guests, now placarding "rooms to let;" assorted antique shops and restaurants,--"the long, unlovely street" of _In Memoriam_, yet with a certain wistful charm in its decayed gentility: that is Charles Street. Number 94 maintained its rubber plant on console-table in dark vestibule. There was a contraption, usually out of order, by which you pulled a bell five times to save yourself the climb if the art colony in the fifth-floor-back did not answer the ring. The young barbarians were usually out. It was a colony of three: Ralph Heard, small, slender, fair, escaped from a western military academy of which he could tell tales that froze the blood; Irving Sisson, a tall, rangy Berkshire Yankee, dry and droll, an Artemus Ward turned art student (though known as "Siss" it would never have occurred to anyone to call him "Sissie," and if anyone _had_ been so rash, Sisson's grim reply would have been, like the man in the yarn, "Smile when you say that"), and Fritz. Their room was a first act stage-set for an American version of _La Bohème_. It was large, low-ceiled, and had one of those sepulchral white marble mantel-pieces of the black walnut period. There was an iron bed and a cot, a gaslight always out of kilter, a writing-table strewn with pipes, unanswered letters, tiny bottles of india ink, drawing pens, crayons, thumb tacks, jars holding bouquets of paint brushes, and scurrilous caricatures of one another scrawled on scraps of white cardboard. The place reeked with that heavenly odor of paint tubes. By the window was a drawing board and portfolios. Canvases were stacked in a dark corner, faces to the wall.