A once-aristocratic residential street now reduced to a teaming thoroughfare; pedestal to Beacon Hill; narrow, ill-paved, spattered with mud to the second story, double row of tall brick town houses, where Thackeray and Dickens were once guests, now placarding "rooms to let;" assorted antique shops and restaurants,—"the long, unlovely street" of In Memoriam, yet with a certain wistful charm in its decayed gentility: that is Charles Street.

Number 94 maintained its rubber plant on console-table in dark vestibule. There was a contraption, usually out of order, by which you pulled a bell five times to save yourself the climb if the art colony in the fifth-floor-back did not answer the ring. The young barbarians were usually out.

It was a colony of three: Ralph Heard, small, slender, fair, escaped from a western military academy of which he could tell tales that froze the blood; Irving Sisson, a tall, rangy Berkshire Yankee, dry and droll, an Artemus Ward turned art student (though known as "Siss" it would never have occurred to anyone to call him "Sissie," and if anyone had been so rash, Sisson's grim reply would have been, like the man in the yarn, "Smile when you say that"), and Fritz.

Their room was a first act stage-set for an American version of La BohÈme. It was large, low-ceiled, and had one of those sepulchral white marble mantel-pieces of the black walnut period. There was an iron bed and a cot, a gaslight always out of kilter, a writing-table strewn with pipes, unanswered letters, tiny bottles of india ink, drawing pens, crayons, thumb tacks, jars holding bouquets of paint brushes, and scurrilous caricatures of one another scrawled on scraps of white cardboard. The place reeked with that heavenly odor of paint tubes. By the window was a drawing board and portfolios. Canvases were stacked in a dark corner, faces to the wall.

Their windows looked into a deep courtyard formed by a triangle of tall brick houses,—the rears of houses on Charles and Brimmer Streets, the fronts of three quaint Italianate red-brick dwellings,—all enclosing a tiny greensward on which slender poplars rustled their glossy leaves. In the farthest corner of this court rise the walls and mullioned windows of the Church of the Advent, and on mild evenings when casements were open, the thrush-like voices of the choir boys over the melodious thunder of great organ floated up to these windows. But I was never able to observe that it produced any pietistic tone in number 94. On the contrary they affected to take a lively interest in the upper windows of the houses opposite and threatened to keep a pair of field glasses on their window sill.

As you go down Pinckney Street to the river you pass a break in the solid row of house fronts through which you can look up and see the two windows of that fifth-floor-back. One always did look, and if they were lighted, it was impossible not to go up; for in that room there was always some form of what is technically known as "trouble." I never pass the spot now without looking up to see if there is a light in those windows.... They are dark.