The wine room is crowded so that he can hardly get a seat to order his breakfast, appetite having by this time obtained temporary ascendency over love. By some deft questioning and pumping of the waiter who attends him, the Englishman soon learns that the man he is in search of only left his late carouse at three o’clock in the morning, and has not yet arisen; probably thinking that retirement will best fit him for a supremely great feat at the shrine of Bacchus. The conversation at the neighboring tables naturally turns upon the drinking bout. The room is full of burghers and artists, some of whom have come to enjoy the artist’s triumph, others to sorrow at the genius that is being killed with wine. There is also a goodly delegation of his creditors, who are here with anxiety in their hearts and on their lips, for Frans Floris’s life is worth a large sum to them on account of the paintings his facile brush creates; but Frans Floris dead is of very little use to them, and they fear that some day he will kill himself by the enormous quantity of wine he may imbibe in his effort to place his competitors beneath the table. “Ah, Mijn Heer Dirk Coornhert, this is a sad day,” remarks a fat, adipose citizen, whose smell of the malt-house proclaims the brewer. “Yes,” replies a man evidently of artistic tastes and education. “Have you seen the poem I’ve printed to warn Floris of the danger of his dissolute habits, not only to his genius but to his life? I read it to him last night. It was an inspiration in which I depicted a dream wherein the spirit of Albert Durer appeared to me and spoke in melancholy and ghostly tones of the spirit sadness that was brought to him even after a hundred years in the other world by an artist of Floris’s ability becoming a drunkard.” “And did it reform him?” jeers the other. “Reform him!” cries Dirk Coornhert. “No, he swore he’d drink the health of Albert Durer’s ghost to-day, and laughed in my face: ‘When I’m drunk, I’m happy; I forget my creditors. When I’m sober my creditors don’t let me forget them.’” “Verdomd! And I’m one of them,” growls the brewer. “Two thousand carolus guilders for malt beer consumed at his house. A painter building the greatest palace in Antwerp! Above its portal that drunken conceit he’s painted: himself standing brush in hand and the muses flying from all over the heavens to crown him. And out of it he drives each day with four white horses in state, everybody doffing their hats to him, his creditors bowing most humbly of all. If I didn’t think the populace would mob me, I’d have him in the debtors’ prison. And then his wife! Faugh! her dandy airs—as if she were a countess.”