The Under Dog

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

The great garden in the rear of the old mansion has also changed. The lines of box and sweet syringa are known only by their roots. The rose-beds are no more, the paths that were woven into long stripes across its grass-plats are overgrown and hardly traceable. Only one lichen-covered, weather-stained seat circling about an old locust-tree remains, and this is on its last legs and needs propping up—or did the last time I saw it. The trees are still there. These old stand-bys reach up their arms so high, and their trunks are so big and straight and smooth, that nothing can despoil them. They will stay there until the end—that is, until some merciless Commissioner runs the line of a city street through their roots. Then their fine old bodies will be drawn and quartered, and their sturdy arms and lesser branches go to feed the fires of some near-by factory.

No ladies of high degree now sip their tea beneath their shade, with liveried servants about the slender-legged tables, as they did in the old days. There are tables, of course—a dozen in all, perhaps, some in white cloths and some in bare tops, bare of everything except the glass of beer—it depends very largely on what one orders, and who orders it—but the servants are missing unless you count Muffles and his stable-boy. Two of these old aristocrats—I am speaking of the old trees now, not Muffles, and certainly not the stable-boy—two giant elms (the same that Washington tied his mare to when they were little)—stand guard on either side of the back porch, a wide veranda of a porch with a honeysuckle, its stem, as thick as your arm, and its scraggy, half-dead tendrils plaited in and out of the palings and newly painted lattice-work.

On Sunday mornings—and this tale begins with a Sunday morning—Muffles always shaved himself on this back porch. On these occasions he was attired in a pair of trousers, a pair of slippers, and a red flannel undershirt.

I am aware that this is not an extraordinary thing for a man living in the country to do on a Sunday morning, and it is not an extraordinary costume in which to do it. It was neither the costume nor the occupation that made the operation notable, but the distinguished company who sat around the operator while it went on.

There was the ex-sheriff—a large, bulbous man with a jet-black mustache hung under his nose, a shirt-collar cut low enough to permit of his breathing, and a skin-tight waistcoat buttoned over a rotundity that rested on his knees. He had restless, quick eyes, and, before his "ex" life began and his avoirdupois gained upon him, restless, quick fingers with steel springs inside of them—good fingers for handling the particular people he "wanted."

Then there was the "Big Pipe" contractor—a lean man with half-moon whiskers, a red, weather-beaten, knotted face, bushy gray eyebrows, and a clean-shaven mouth that looked when shut like a healed scar. On Sunday this magnate wore a yellow diamond pin and sat in his shirt-sleeves.

There could be found, too, now and then, tilted back on their chairs, two or three of the light-fingered gentry from the race-course near by—pale, consumptive-looking men, with field-glasses hung over their shoulders and looking like bank-clerks, they were so plainly and neatly dressed; as well as some of the less respectable neighbors, besides a few intimate personal friends like myself.

While Muffles shaved and the group about him discussed the several ways—some of them rather shady, I'm afraid—in which they and their constituents earned their daily bread, the stable-boy—he was a street waif, picked up to keep him from starving—served the beverages. Muffles had no Sunday license, of course, but a little thing like that never disturbed Muffles or his friends—not with the Captain of the Precinct as part owner.

My intimacy with Muffles dated from a visit I had made him a year before, when I stopped in one of my sketching-tramps to get something cooling. A young friend of mine—a musician—was with me. Muffles's garden was filled with visitors: some celebration or holiday had called the people out. Muffles, in expectation, had had the piano tuned and had sent to town for an orchestra of three. The cornet and bass-viol had put in an appearance, but the pianist had been lost in the shuffle.

"De bloke ain't showed up and we can't git nothin' out o' de fish-horn and de scrape—see?" was the way Muffles put it.