ccasion to absent
himself from his office for an indefinite period. At the top of the door
there was a swinging window, which was ever close fastened, and covered
with four thicknesses of newspapers. Though door and window were shut,
there came from this room, as if through pores of the wood and the
glass, a strong odor of tobacco smoke. A voice within could be heard
softly humming an operatic air.

Wesley Tiffles opened the door with a latch key, saying, "All right!" in
a loud voice, as he did so. Marcus entered with him into a blue cloud of
smoke heated to a sickly degree by a small coal stove with a prodigious
quantity of pipe. Even Marcus's hardened lungs found it difficult
to breathe.

The room was about twenty feet square. It had been a part of the laundry
when the building was a hotel. The walls, from the floor to the low
ceiling, appeared to be hung with a strange, dim tapestry. A second
glance convinced Marcus Wilkeson that this seeming tapestry was the
panorama, which was fastened on stretchers along three sides of the
room, and rolled up in a corner as fast as completed. At the farther end
of the room, barely visible through the smoke, was the figure of a man
in a torn and dirty dressing gown, and an enormous black felt hat with a
huge turn-up brim, of the kind supposed to be worn by the bandits of the
Pyrenees. The back of the man was turned to Marcus Wilkeson, and he was
making rapid dabs on the canvas with a long brush, frequently dipping
into one of a series of pails or pans which stood on the floor by his
side. He was smoking and humming the operatic air at the same time; and
he pulled his great slouched hat farther over his eyes, as a signal for
impertinent curiosity to keep its distance.

Wesley Tiffles whispered something about the eccentricities of genius,
and then said:

"Mr. Patching. Allow me. Mr. Wilkeson. A capitalist, who thinks of
taking a small interest in the panorama. Confidential, of course."

The artist turned round during these remarks, and presented the original
of a portrait which Marcus remembered to have seen--dressing gown, hat,
and all--in a small print-shop window in the Sixth Avenue. Touching the
face he might have had doubt, but there was no mistaking the pattern of
the dressing gown and the amazing hat. He also had a faint recollection
of the thin face, the Vandyke beard, and the long, tangled hair at Mrs.
Slapman's, on New Year's, but was not positive as to their identity