Ritter sent word asking the gentlemen to come to his private studio.  They passed through a room in which a stately young lady was working without a model at an almost completed portrait bust in clay.  In the next room, three or four marble-cutters were making a great noise hammering and chiselling imperturbably, without glancing up, at marble blocks of various sizes.  From this room, a cast-iron circular stairway led up to a narrow skylight studio, where Bonifacius Ritter received Frederick and Peter.

It was a delight merely to behold the young master in his slimness and elegance.  When the men entered, he removed his left hand from the pocket of his light smock, tossed away his burning cigarette, and greeted them with evident pleasure, blushing like a girl.  He ushered them into a small room adjoining, lighted by a single window of antique stained glass from a French church.  The low ceiling was coffered in weathered oak, and the walls were panelled in wood to a height of about six feet.  A heavy oak table with benches on three sides took up nearly half the length of the room.  The front of the room was partially blocked up by a genuine Nuremberg stove with the precious Delft tiles of antique green glaze testifying to the wonderful old potter’s art.  Willy Snyders had chanced upon the beautiful Renaissance piece in a shop near the wharf, and had succeeded in buying it for Ritter for only one hundred dollars.

“Here’s a comfortable corner of the Fatherland,” said Ritter.  “Willy planned it all, collected all the stuff, and attended to the entire furnishing.”

The university student in Frederick, the thorough German in him was surprised and delighted.  Though the room looked like the cell of a St. Jerome, or, better still, the study of an Erasmus, it nevertheless resembled in its least details the dim sanctum of a German Weinstube, and all the more so when a young man in a blue apron, a stone-cutter’s helper, who might equally well have been a wine-cellar keeper, brought in a bottle of old Rhine wine and several coloured hock glasses.

The wonderful poetry of their student days long past descended upon the friends.  Frederick was still in a state of excitement and irrational recklessness.  He pinned his faith to the moment, ready to stake his yesterday and his morrow upon it.  The twilight of the room brought back memories of youthfully blissful times.  He had found his old friend again and a new friend of the same warmth of temperament and of the same German ways, far from the old home.  Settling himself snugly in the corner by the window, like a man intending to take his ease in a restaurant, he touched glasses with the others and uttered an exclamation of rapture.

“You’ll never get me to budge from this corner, Mr. Ritter—­though,” he added, “I should first like to see your works.”

“No hurry about that,” said Ritter gaily, at the same time bringing an album bound in pigskin, in which he asked Frederick and Schmidt to write their names.  Then he opened a very practical closet reaching to the floor, one of Willy’s contrivances, and took out a carved wooden figure, a German Madonna by Till Riemenschneider.  The sweet oval of her lovely face was not so much that of a Madonna as of a real German Gretchen.