To-night it was the humor of the club to reproduce as closely as possible, with the limited means at their disposal--for none of the Stone Mugs were rolling in wealth, nor did these functions require it--some one of the great banquets of former times, not to be historically or chronologically correct, but to express the artistic atmosphere of such an occasion. That there were certain unavoidable and easily detected shams under all this glamour of color and form did not lessen the charm of the present function. Everybody, of course, knew before the evening was over, or could have found out had he tried, that the two knights in armor who guarded the side-walk entrance to this royal chamber, and who had been the target of the street-rats until they took their places at the inside door, were respectively Mr. Patrick McGinnis, who tended the furnace in the basement of the Tenth Street Studio Building, stripped for the occasion down to his red flannels, and Signore Luigi Bennelli, his Italian assistant. A closer inspection of the two ebony blackamoors, with drawn scimitars, who guarded the royal chair at the head of the table, would have revealed the fact that they were not made of ebony at all, but of veritable flesh and blood--the blackamoor on the right being none other than Black Sam, the bootblack who shined shoes on the corner of the avenue, and his bloodthirsty pal on the left the kinky-haired porter who served the grocer next door; the only "HONEST" thing about either of them, to quote Waller, being the artistic clothes that they stood in. Further investigation would have shown that every one of the wonderful things that made glad and glorious the big square room on the ground floor of the building, from the brass sconces on the walls to the hanging church lamps, with everything that their lights fell upon, had been gathered up that same morning from the several homes and studios of the members by old black Jerry, the official carman of the Academy, and had been dumped in an indiscriminate heap on the floor of the banquet hall, where they had been disentangled and arranged by half a dozen painters of the club; that the table and table cloth had been borrowed from Solari's; that the very rare and fragrant old Chianti, the club's private stock, was from Solari's own cellars via Duncan's, the grocer; and that the dinner itself was cooked and served by that distinguished boniface himself, assisted by half a dozen of his own waiters, each one wearing an original Malay costume selected from Stedman's collection and used by him in his great picture of the Sepoy mutiny.