He found himself in a very long, rectangular hall, low in the ceiling in proportion to the length, once brightly decorated, but faded, smoked and tarnished.  On the walls, in panels, between tinted pilasters of a pseudo-Grecian design, were views of the principal towns of Germany and Austria, the details obliterated in the upper part by smoke and in the lower by greasy heads and hands.  Around the sides, a dais held benches and tables similar to those on the floor.  At the far end was a bar for beer and other liquors less popular, and an entrance from a main street, screened and indirect, down steps at another level than the rear or stage door.  Where Claudius sat was a small stage with footlights and curtain complete, and an orchestra for a miniature piano such as are used in yachts, and six musicians; the performers sat to face the audience respectfully in the good Old German style.

The lighting was by means of clusters of gas-jets at intervals in the long ceiling and along the walls.  The announcement of the items of attraction appearing on the stage was made by changeable sliding cards in framework at the sides of the stage; to the left the name of the scena was exhibited, that of the artist on the other.

When Claudius took his seat, the other places were almost all empty; but they soon began to fill up.  The majority of the spectators seemed to be of the tradesman and workman class, with their wives and daughters, but the stranger, who had been so surreptitiously “passed in,” was not blind to the presence of a more offensive element.  There were faces as villainous as any under the immediate command of Grandmother “Baboushka;” and their dress was not much better.  More than one dandy of the gutter nursed the head of a club called significantly the “lawbreaker’s canes of crime,” with a distant air of the fop sucking his clouded amber knob or silver shepherd’s-crook.  In more than one group were horse-copers, and their kin the market-gardeners’ thieves and country wagoners’ pests, who not only lighten the loads on the way to the city market on the road, but plunder the drivers after they receive their salesmoney by cheating at cards.

The student, crowded in by this mixed throng, began to doubt the providential quality of the intervention saving him from an explanation to the police; it was very like leaping from the proverbial frying-pan into the fire.

At this stage in his reflections, he felt that a person in the next seat had risen and he soon perceived that he had politely, or from a stronger reason, given up his place to another.  This was the old Jew, but he would not have known him by his dress, it was so changed for the better; the fine profile, the venerable beard which an Arab Sheikh would have reverenced, and the sharp, intelligent eyes were unaltered.

“Do you speak Latin?” inquired Daniels in that tongue.

But Claudius, though reading the dead tongue fluently, pronounced it after the University manner, and felt that he could not sustain a dialogue with one who followed the Italian usage.  He could speak Italian, however, for he had long studied it to be at home in the world of Art.