morning. Don't use too many." 

 "Thank you," Jurgen replied, making a sincere effort at politeness. He went back up and got a set of sheets and a towel, then made his bed. 

 Afterwards, he sat on the edge of the bed and opened his valise. It contained underwear, a well-used black suit with tails, a silk shirt, a silk hat, soap and shaving kit, and sheaf after sheaf of printed music. Everything else he had sold as necessary; his cash was securely fastened around his waist in a money-belt. He wondered if there were a trustworthy bank in the neighborhood. Tomorrow, he decided, he would have to go look. 

 Jurgen surveyed the room carefully before turning in. On the back of the door a relatively new calendar was posted with two thumb tacks. It featured a blonde woman with exquisite, long legs and a coquettish smile—advertising a well-known brand of chewing tobacco. It was the fourteenth of November, he noted. Fifty-seven years ago to the day, his grandmother had arrived in New York harbor from Hungary, dragging two young children behind her—with less money in her pocket than he had. He pondered her memory for a moment—she had been his first musical mentor—then went to switch off the light. He laid down on the bed beneath fresh cotton sheets and listened to the far-off sounds of the city—automobiles and trains, mostly—until he fell asleep. 

 Early in the morning, just after sunrise, Jurgen practiced the viola quietly for an hour or so. He had no clock, but when he judged, by the sounds in the street that the time was past ten, he left the hotel with his viola case under his arm. He spent the day wandering from street-corner to street-corner in a nearby business district along the river-front and by late afternoon had earned enough money for two full meals. He played mostly Stephen Foster songs—everyone knew them and they never failed to bring smiles. Occasionally a nice old lady would stop, and blushing, ask whether he knew one or another of the favorite tunes of some prior season. As often as not, he had never heard of the tune, but when he did know it, he laid into the instrument with such vigor that they always left a good fistful of coins in his open case. 

 At a nearby hash-slinging café where the cook had anchors tattooed on both arms, Jurgen ate breakfast. The waitress wore silk stockings beneath a soiled uniform with pink and white stripes—and kept a pencil behind each ear, both of them dull with their ends chewed. Jurgen reflected with some amusement that his description could fit the people 

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