The piano, decrepit on its legs, though made of good wood painted black and gilded, was dirty, defaced, and scratched; and its keys, worn like the teeth of old horses, were yellowed with the fuliginous colors of the pipe.  On the desk, a little heap of ashes showed that the night before Schmucke had bestrode the old instrument to some musical Walhalla.  The floor, covered with dried mud, torn papers, tobacco-dust, fragments indescribable, was like that of a boy’s school-room, unswept for a week, on which a mound of things accumulate, half rags, half filth.

A more practised eye than that of the countess would have seen certain other revelations of Schmucke’s mode of life,—­chestnut-peels, apple-parings, egg-shells dyed red in broken dishes smeared with sauer-kraut.  This German detritus formed a carpet of dusty filth which crackled under foot, joining company near the hearth with a mass of cinders and ashes descending majestically from the fireplace, where lay a block of coal, before which two slender twigs made a show of burning.  On the chimney-piece was a mirror in a painted frame, adorned with figures dancing a saraband; on one side hung the glorious pipe, on the other was a Chinese jar in which the musician kept his tobacco.  Two arm-chairs bought at auction, a thin and rickety cot, a worm-eaten bureau without a top, a maimed table on which lay the remains of a frugal breakfast, made up a set of household belongings as plain as those of an Indian wigwam.  A shaving-glass, suspended to the fastening of a curtainless window, and surmounted by a rag striped by many wipings of a razor, indicated the only sacrifices paid by Schmucke to the Graces and society.  The cat, being the feebler and protected partner, had rather the best of the establishment; he enjoyed the comforts of an old sofa-cushion, near which could be seen a white china cup and plate.  But what no pen can describe was the state into which Schmucke, the cat, and the pipe, that existing trinity, had reduced these articles.  The pipe had burned the table.  The cat and Schmucke’s head had greased the green Utrecht velvet of the two arm-chairs and reduced it to a slimy texture.  If it had not been for the cat’s magnificent tail, which played a useful part in the household, the uncovered places on the bureau and the piano would never have been dusted.  In one corner of the room were a pile of shoes which need an epic to describe them.  The top of the bureau and that of the piano were encumbered by music-books with ragged backs and whitened corners, through which the pasteboard showed its many layers.  Along the walls the names and addresses of pupils written on scraps of paper were stuck on by wafers,—­the number of wafers without paper indicating the number of pupils no longer taught.  On the wall-papers were many calculations written with chalk.  The bureau was decorated with beer-mugs used the night before, their newness appearing very brilliant in the midst of this rubbish of dirt