t actually as light as day, at all
events sufficiently illuminated by a dozen lamps along the wall. In the
rear, where at this time scarcely any one passed through the deserted
street, the upper, semicircular part of the windows was left open for
the sake of ventilation, while the lower part remained tightly closed.
Dark figures approached along the street, singly, or in groups of two
or three just as they chanced to come together, and entered the house
by the back door. On the side toward the English Garden everything
remained as dark and lifeless as was ever an old wall behind which
counterfeiters ply their trade in dimly-lighted cellars.

The interior of the hall was, when seen by daylight, not altogether
unornamented. The inspired hand of some house-painter had covered the
wall spaces between the windows with bold landscape conceptions _al
fresco_, where were to be seen, amid fabulous castles, cities,
river-gorges, and wooded ravines, blue wanderers strolling about in
green hats, and horsemen careering on chargers of very questionable
anatomy, followed by dogs that belonged to no known race. In the
dazzling blue sky above these outgrowths of a cheery decorator's
fantasy, sometimes through a tree-top or the slanting pinnacle of a
robber-castle, a society of carpenters' apprentices, which met here
once a week, had driven large nails that they might hang up
symmetrically their various diplomas, decorated with pictures and
mottoes, and dotted with little balls.

But, on the night of which we speak, all this splendor had disappeared
behind a thick veil of growing plants. Tall evergreen bushes stood
between the windows, and stretched their slender branches to the roof,
so that the squalid walls seemed transformed into a tropical garden. A
long, narrow table, with green, big-bellied flagons, occupied the
middle of the room, and in a corner was a cask, about the polished tap
of which hung a wreath of roses, while on a little table near by stood
baskets with white rolls and a few plates of fruit.

Only a few dozen chairs surrounded the table, and these were not more
than half occupied, when Jansen and Felix entered the room. Through the
light haze of lamplight and tobacco-smoke they could discern the pale
face of Elfinger beside the battle-painter's blooming countenance; the
fez-covered head of Edward Rossel, comfortably reclining in an American
rocking-chair and smoking a chibouque; then one and another of the
artists wh