Of the two persons who left their homes this morning, the legless
beggar, owing to having ridden part of the way in a street-car, was the
first to reach the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Washington
Square, whence the last rear-guard of fashion in old New York retreats
before the advance-pickets of the encroaching slums, like a stag before
a pack of hounds. Here he ensconced himself, placed his tin cup on the
top of his organ, together with the few pairs of shoe-laces which
proclaimed him a merchant within rather than a beggar without the law,
and proceeded to enliven the still quiet neighborhood with the
dreadfully strained measure of Verdi's "Miserère." He turned the handles
of the little organ fitfully, so that now the strains of sorrow arose at
such long intervals as hardly to be connected with one another, and now
all huddled and jumbled like notes in a barbaric quickstep, and as he
played he addressed his instrument in a quiet, cruel voice.
A house-maid opened a window in the servants' wing of No. 1 Fifth
Avenue. Blizzard turned his head slowly at the sound, and looked up at
her with agate eyes, coldly interrogative. There was no one else at the
moment within earshot.
Nevertheless before speaking the house-maid looked nervously into the
house behind her; then up the avenue, and down into Washington Square.
She was a girl of some beauty, but her face was most engaging from a
kind of waggish intelligence that it had.
"Tst!" she said.
The organ squeaked and rattled. It was manoeuvring for a position from
which to attack the "Danse Macabre." Blizzard indicated by a lift of
heavy eyebrows that he was all attention.
"You can trust Blake," she said.