Not the tousled, ill-clad Waller, the "Walrus" of former days--no one dared to call the painter by any such names since his picture took the Medaille d'Honneur at Paris--and not the slender, smooth-faced Simmons, who in the old days was content to take his chances of filling a vacancy at Wallack's or the Winter Garden, when some one of the regular orchestra was under the weather; but a sleek, prosperous, rotund Waller, with a bit of red in his button-hole, a wide expanse of shirt-front, and a waxed mustache; and a thoughtful, slightly bald, and well-dressed Simmons, with gold eyeglasses, and his hair worn long in his neck as befitted the leader of an orchestra whose concerts crowded the Academy to the doors. These two arrivals nodded to Jack and Fred, Waller cursing the weather as he hung up his coat on a peg behind the door (unnecessary formalities of every kind, including the shaking of hands and asking after each other's health, were dispensed with by men who saw each other several times a day at their different haunts), and Simmons, without stopping to take off his wet coat, flung his hat on the divan, crossed the room, and seated himself at the piano. "Went this way, Waller, didn't it?" said Simmons striking the keys, continuing the conversation the two had evidently had on the stairs. "Never heard Parepa in better voice. She filled every corner of the house. Crug told me he was up in Africa in the back row and never missed a note. Do you remember this?" and the musician's fingers again slipped over the keys, and one of the great singer's trills rippled through the room, to which Waller nodded approvingly, mopping his wet face with his handkerchief as he listened. The opening and shutting of the door, the stamping of feet, the general imprecations hurled at the climate, and the scattering of wet snow and rain-drops about the entrance became constant. Crug bustled in--a short, thick-set, rosy-cheeked young fellow in a black mackintosh and a white silk muffler--a 'cellist of repute, who had spent two years at the conservatoire, and who had once played for Eugenie at one of her musicales at the Tuileries, a fact he never let you forget. And close behind him came Watson, the landscape-painter, who had had two pictures accepted by the Royal Academy--one of them hung on the line, a great honor for an American; and after them blue-eyed, round-faced Munson, a pupil of Kaulbach, and late from Munich; as well as Harry Stedman, Post, the art-critic, and one or two others.