He did not move, and merely waved the two silver threads of his right whisker as he turned his golden eyes on Schmucke.
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.