Norway, where he had been sketching on board some lord's
yacht--he of the grizzly brown beard, brown ulster reaching to his
toes, gray-checked steamer-cap and brierwood pipe--an outfit which he
never changed--"slept in them," Marny insisted.

"Me name's Pudfut," he began, holding out his hand to Marny. "I've got
a letter in my clothes for ye from a chap in Paris."

"Don't pull it out," had come the answer. "Put it there!" and within an
hour the breezy fellow, his arm through the Englishman's, had trotted
him all over Dort from the Groote Kerk to the old Gate of William of
Orange, introducing him to every painter he met on the way, first as
Pudfut, then as Puddy, then as Pretty-foot, then as Tootsie-Wootsie,
and last as Toots--a name by which he is known in the Quartier to this
day. This done, he had taken him up to his own room and had dumped him
into an extra cot--his for the rest of the summer.

Then Schonholz wandered in--five gulden a week board was the magnet--a
cheese-faced, good-natured German lad with forehead so high that when
he raised his hat Marny declared, with a cry of alarm, that his scalp
had slipped, and only regained his peace of mind when he had twisted
his fat fingers in the lad's forelock to make sure that it was still
fast. Schonholz had passed a year at Heidelberg and carried his diploma
on his cheek--two crisscross slashes that had never healed--spoke
battered English, wore a green flat-topped cap, and gray bobtailed coat
with two rows of horn buttons ("Come to shoot chamois, have you?" Marny
had asked when he presented his credentials.)--laughed three-quarters
of the time he was awake, and never opened his kit or set a palette
while he was in Dort. "Too vet and too fodgy all dime," was the way he
accounted for his laziness.

Last came Joplin--a man of thirty-five; bald as an egg and as shiny.
("Dangerous to have a hen around," Marny would say, rubbing the pate
after the manner of a phrenologist.) Gaunt, wiry; jerky in his
movements as a Yankee clock and as regular in his habits: hot water
when he got up--two glasses, sipped slowly; cold water when he went to
bed, head first, feet next, then the rest of him; window open all night
no matter how hard it blew or rained; ate three meals a day and no
more; chewed every mouthful of food thirty times--coffee, soup, even
his drinking-water (Gladstone had taught him that, he boasted)--a
walking laboratory of a man, who knew it all, took no layman's ad