To the casual eye there would have seemed little in his surroundings to inspire any lyric joy. The cell-like apartment, which was the only spot on earth that Hermann might call his home, was a back room on the top floor of a damp and gloomy tenement in a filthy court running off Houston Street near Avenue A. Only at noon did the pale sunlight strain into that court, crowded all morning with malarious dogs and dirty, toddling babies solemnly, but vainly, trying to learn how to play, and echoing all through the black night now to the curses of scarred, slinking tiger-cats, now to the staggering footsteps or the brawling oaths of drunkards reeling homeward through the evil-smelling darkness, and again to the piercing cry of a woman in mortal agony or mortal fear. Robbins's Row was no place for a policeman after nightfall, and scarcely a safer place for a stranger by day. From its sagging file of dirty, paper-patched windows, more or less feminine shapes leaned out, calling gossip to their neighbors, and hauling at the pullied ropes that, crossing the street, spread above the pedestrians a tossing, parti-colored canopy of "wash." You entered it by climbing three rotting wooden steps, by stumbling through a wet hall, where a blue-burning gas-jet accentuated the sense of perpetual midnight, and you could reach the room of Hermann Hoffmann only by a perilous climb of six flights of stairs. That room was as bare as any in the building. It looked out, by a single slit in the wall, upon a light-shaft, strangely misnamed. Its only furniture was a cot, a wooden-seated chair, a washstand, and, bearing comb and brushes and shaving-utensils, one of those pine bureaus the drawers of which may be opened in ten minutes, and closed, if you are lucky, in fifteen. Yet the note of the place was the note of order and of neatness; the bare floor was clean, and, against the fresh and brightly papered wall, there hung here a calico curtain that hid the tenant's wardrobe and there a single shelf bearing only, as if it were an altar consecrated to one holy object, a thumbed and dog's-eared copy of "Das Kapital." Hermann plunged his ruddy face, whistling, into a bowl of water and drew it out, more ruddy and whistling still. Even the author of that portentous volume on the book-shelf used to sing "Strausbourg," and Hermann's single anthem was "Die Wacht Am Rhein."