On Sunday mornings--and this tale begins with a Sunday morning--Muffles always shaved himself on this back porch. On these occasions he was attired in a pair of trousers, a pair of slippers, and a red flannel undershirt. I am aware that this is not an extraordinary thing for a man living in the country to do on a Sunday morning, and it is not an extraordinary costume in which to do it. It was neither the costume nor the occupation that made the operation notable, but the distinguished company who sat around the operator while it went on. There was the ex-sheriff--a large, bulbous man with a jet-black mustache hung under his nose, a shirt-collar cut low enough to permit of his breathing, and a skin-tight waistcoat buttoned over a rotundity that rested on his knees. He had restless, quick eyes, and, before his "ex" life began and his avoirdupois gained upon him, restless, quick fingers with steel springs inside of them--good fingers for handling the particular people he "wanted." Then there was the "Big Pipe" contractor--a lean man with half-moon whiskers, a red, weather-beaten, knotted face, bushy gray eyebrows, and a clean-shaven mouth that looked when shut like a healed scar. On Sunday this magnate wore a yellow diamond pin and sat in his shirt-sleeves. There could be found, too, now and then, tilted back on their chairs, two or three of the light-fingered gentry from the race-course near by--pale, consumptive-looking men, with field-glasses hung over their shoulders and looking like bank-clerks, they were so plainly and neatly dressed; as well as some of the less respectable neighbors, besides a few intimate personal friends like myself. While Muffles shaved and the group about him discussed the several ways--some of them rather shady, I'm afraid--in which they and their constituents earned their daily bread, the stable-boy--he was a street waif, picked up to keep him from starving--served the beverages. Muffles had no Sunday license, of course, but a little thing like that never disturbed Muffles or his friends--not with the Captain of the Precinct as part owner. My intimacy with Muffles dated from a visit I had made him a year before, when I stopped in one of my sketching-tramps to get something cooling. A young friend of mine--a musician--was with me. Muffles's garden was filled with visitors: some celebration or holiday had called the people out. Muffles, in expectation, had had the piano tuned and had sent to town for an orchestra of three. The cornet and bass-viol had put in an appearance, but the pianist had been lost in the shuffle. "De bloke ain't showed up and we can't git nothin' out o' de fish-horn and de scrape--see?" was the way Muffles put it. My friend was a graduate of the Conservatoire, an ex-stroke, crew of '91, owned a pair of shears which he used twice a year in the vaults of a downtown bank, and breakfasted every day at twelve--but none of these things had spoiled him.