And such forlorn, desolate rooms; up two flights of dusty stairs, in a rickety, dingy loft off Broadway, within a short walk of Union Square--an auction-room on the ground floor and a bar-room in the rear. The largest of these rooms was used for the annual exhibition of the Academicians and their associates, and the smaller ones were given over to the students; one, a better lighted apartment, being filled with the usual collection of casts--the Milo, the Fighting Gladiator, Apollo Belvidere, Venus de Medici, etc., etc.; the other being devoted to the uses of the life-class and its models. Not the nude. Whatever may have been clone in the studios, in the class-room it was always the draped model that posed--the old woman who washed for a living on the top floor, or one of her chubby children or buxom daughters, or perhaps the peddler who strayed in to sell his wares and left his head behind him on ten different canvases and in as many different positions. The casts themselves were backed up against the walls; some facing the windows for lights and darks, and others pushed toward the middle of the room, where the glow of the gas-jets could accentuate their better points. The Milo, by right of divinity, held the centre position--she being beautiful from any point of sight and available from any side. The Theseus and the Gladiator stood in the corners, affording space for the stools of two or three students and their necessary easels. Scattered about on the coarse, whitewashed walls were hung the smaller life-casts; fragments of the body--an arm, leg, or hand, or sections of a head--and tucked in between could be found cheap lithographic productions of the work of the students and professors of the Paris and Dusseldorf schools. The gas-lights under which the students worked at night were hooded by cheap paper shades of the students' own fashioning, and the lower sashes of the windows were smeared with whitewash or covered with newspapers to concentrate the light. During working hours the drawing-boards were propped upon rude easels or slanted on overturned chairs, the students sitting on three-legged stools.