It was about this time that I met General Brace and the Professor. One was a Harvard graduate, and the other came from good old Yale; and both were grafters. When I knew them they used to hang out in a joint on Seventh Street, waiting to be treated. They had been good grafters, but through hop and booze had come down from forging and queer-shoving to common shop-lifting and petty larceny business. General Brace was very reticent in regard to his family and his own past, but as I often invited him to smoke opium with me, he sometimes gave me little confidences. I learned that he came from a well-known Southern family, and had held a good position in his native city; but he was a blood, and to satisfy his habits he began to forge checks. His relatives saved him from prison, but he left home and started on the downward career of graftdom. We called him General Brace because he looked like a soldier and was continually on the borrow; but a good story always accompanied his asking for a loan and he was seldom refused. I have often listened to this man after he had smoked a quantity of opium, and his conversational powers were something remarkable. Many a gun and politician would listen to him with wonder. I used to call him General Brace Coleridge.
The Professor was almost as good a talker. We used to treat them both, in order to get them to converse together. It was a liberal education to hear them hold forth in that low-down saloon, where some of the finest talks on literature and politics were listened to with interest by men born and bred on the East Side, with no more education than a turnip, but with keen wits. The graduates had good manners, and we liked them and staked them regularly. They used to write letters for politicians and guns who could not read or write. They stuck together like brothers. If one of them had five cents, he would go into a morgue (gin-mill where rot-gut whiskey could be obtained for that sum) and pour out almost a full tumbler of booze. Just as he sipped a little of the rot-gut, his pal would come in, as though by accident. If it was the General who had made the purchase, he would say: "Hello, old pal, just taste this fine whiskey. It tastes like ten-cent stuff." The Professor would take a sip and become enthusiastic. They would sip and exclaim in turn, until the booze was all gone, and no further expense incurred. This little trick grew into a habit, and the bar-tender got on to it, but he liked Colonel Brace and the Professor so much that he used to wink at it.