The inner room is hung round with pictures and engravings of various kinds, — a painting of a premium ox, a lithograph of a Turk and of a Turkish lady, … . and various showily engraved tailors’ advertisements, and other shopbills; among them all, a small painting of a drunken toper, sleeping on a bench beside the grogshop, — a ragged, half-hatless, bloated, red-nosed, jolly, miserable-looking devil, very well done, and strangely suitable to the room in which it hangs. Round the walls are placed some half a dozen marble-topped tables, and a centre-table in the midst; most of them strewn with theatrical and other show-bills; and the large theatre-bills, with their type of gigantic solidity and blackness, hung against the walls.
Last evening, when I entered, there was one guest somewhat overcome with liquor, and slumbering with his chair tipped against one of the marble tables. In the course of a quarter of an hour, he roused himself (a plain, middle-aged man), and went out with rather an unsteady step, and a hot, red face. One or two others were smoking, and looking over the papers, or glancing at a playbill. From the centre of the ceiling descended a branch with two gas-burners, which sufficiently illuminated every corner of the room. Nothing is so remarkable in these bar-rooms and drinking-places, as the perfect order that prevails: if a man gets drunk, it is no otherwise perceptible than by his going to sleep, or his inability to walk.
Pacing the sidewalk in front of this grogshop of Parker’s (or sometimes, on cold and rainy days, taking his station inside), there is generally to be observed an elderly ragamuffin, in a dingy and battered hat, an old surtout, and a more than shabby general aspect; a thin face and red nose, a patch over one eye, and the other half drowned in moisture. He leans in a slightly stooping posture on a stick, forlorn and silent, addressing nobody, but fixing his one moist eye on you with a certain intentness. he is a man who has been in decent circumstances at some former period of his life, but, falling into decay (perhaps by dint of too frequent visits at Parker’s bar), he now haunts about the place, as a ghost haunts the spot where he was murdered, “to collect his rents,” as Parker says, — that is, to catch an occasional ninepence from some charitable acquaintances, or a glass of liquor at the bar. The word “ragamuffin,” which I have used above, does not accurately express the man, because there is a sort of shadow or delusion of respectability about him, and a sobriety too, and a kind of decency in his groggy and red-nosed destitution.
Underground, beneath the drinking and smoking rooms, is Parker’s eating-hall, extending all the way to Court Street. All sorts of good eating may be had there, and a gourmand may feast at what expense he will.
I take an interest in all the nooks and crannies and every development of cities; so here I try to make a description of the view from the back windows of a house in the centre of Boston, at which I now glance in the intervals of writing. The view is bounded, at perhaps thirty yards’ distance, by a row of opposite brick dwellings, standing, I think, on Temple Place; houses of the better order, with tokens of genteel families visible in all the rooms betwixt the basements and the attic windows in the roof; plate-glass in the rear drawing-rooms, flowerpots in some of the windows of the upper stories. Occasionally, a lady’s figure, either seated or appearing with a flitting grace, or dimly manifest farther within the obscurity of the room. A balcony, with a wrought-iron fence running along under the row of drawing-room windows, above the basement. In the space betwixt the opposite row of dwellings and that in which I am situated are the low outhouses of the above-described houses, with flat roofs; or solid brick walls, with walks on them, and high railings, for the convenience of the washerwomen in hanging out their clothes. In the intervals are grass-plots, already green, because so sheltered; and fruit-trees, now beginning to put forth their leaves, and one of them, a cherry-tree, almost in full blossom. Birds flutter and sing among these trees. I should judge it a good site for the growth of delicate fruit; for, quite enclosed on all sides by houses, the blighting winds cannot molest the trees. They have sunshine on them a good part of the day, though the shadow must come early, and I suppose there is a rich soil about the roots. I see grapevines clambering against one wall, and also peeping over another, where the main body of the vine is invisible to me. In another place, a frame is erected for a grapevine, and probably it will produce as rich clusters as the vines of Madeira, here in the heart of the city, in this little spot of fructifying earth, while the thunder of wheels rolls about it on every side. The trees are not all fruit-trees. One pretty well-grown buttonwood-tree aspires upward above the roofs of the houses. In the full verdure of summer, there will be quite a mass or curtain of foliage between the hither and the thither row of houses.
Afternoon. — At eleven, I went to give Mr. Thompson a sitting for my picture. I like the painter. He seems to reverence his art and to aim at truth in it, as I said before; a man of gentle disposition too, and simplicity of life and character. I seated myself in the pictorial chair, with the only light in the room descending upon me from a high opening, almost at the ceiling, the rest of the sole window being shuttered. He began to work, and we talked in an idle and desultory way, — neither of us feeling very conversable, — which he attributed to the atmosphere, it being a bright, west-windy, bracing day. We talked about the pictures of Christ, and how inadequate and untrue they are. He said he thought artists should attempt only to paint child-Christs, human powers being inadequate to the task of painting such purity and holiness in a manly development. Then he said that an idea of a picture had occurred to him that morning, while reading a chapter in the New Testament, — how “they parted his garments among them, and for his vesture did cast lots.” His picture was to represent the soldier to whom the garment without a seam had fallen, after taking it home and examining it, and becoming impressed with a sense of the former wearer’s holiness. I do not quite see how he would make such a picture tell its own story; — but I find the idea suggestive to my own mind, and I think I could make something of it. We talked of physiognomy and impressions of character, — first impressions, — and how apt they are to come aright in the face of the closest subsequent observation.
There were several visitors in the course of the sitting, one a gentleman, a connection from the country, with whom the artist talked about family matters and personal affairs, — observing on the poorness of his own business, and that he had thoughts of returning to New York. I wish he would meet with better success. Two or three ladies also looked in. Meanwhile Mr. Thompson had been painting with more and more eagerness, casting quick, keen glances at me, and then making hasty touches on the picture, as if to secure with his brush what he had caught with his eye. He observed that he was just getting interested in the work, and I could recognize the feeling that was in him as akin to what I have experienced myself in the glow of composition. Nevertheless, he seemed able to talk about foreign matters, through it all. He continued to paint in this rapid way, up to the moment of closing the sitting; when he took the canvas from the easel, without giving me time to mark what progress he had made, as he did the last time.
The artist is middle-sized, thin, a little stooping, with a quick, nervous movement. He has black hair, not thick, a beard under his chin, a small head, but well-developed forehead, black eyebrows, eyes keen, but kindly, and a dark face, not indicating robust health, but agreeable in its expression. His voice is gentle and sweet, and such as comes out from amidst refined feelings. He dresses very simply and unpictorially in a gray frock or sack, and does not seem to think of making a picture of himself in his own person.
At dinner to-day there was a young Frenchman, whom — — — befriended a year or so ago, when he had not another friend in America, and obtained employment for him in a large drygoods establishment. He is a young man of eighteen or thereabouts, with smooth black hair, neatly dressed; his face showing a good disposition, but with nothing of intellect or character. It is funny to think of this poor little Frenchman, a Parisian too, eating our most un-French victuals, — our beefsteaks, and roasts, and various homely puddings and hams, and all things most incongruent to his hereditary stomach; but nevertheless