The butcher, the baker,
the candlestick maker, and the brewer--especially the brewer--knew him
as Mr. Richard Mulford, proprietor of the Shady Side on the Bronx--and
his associates as Dick. Only his intimates knew him as Muffles. I am one
of his intimates. This last sobriquet he earned as a boy among his
fellow wharf-rats, by reason of an extreme lightness of foot attended by
an equally noiseless step, particularly noticeable when escaping from
some guardian of the peace who had suddenly detected him raiding an
apple-stand not his own, or in depleting a heap of peanuts the property
of some gentleman of foreign birth, or in making off with a just-emptied
ash-barrel--Muffles did the emptying--on the eve of an election.
If any member of his unknown and widely scattered family reached the
dignity of being considered the flower of the clan, no stretch of
imagination or the truth on the part of his acquaintances--and they
were numerous--ever awarded that distinction to Muffles. He might have
been a weed, but he was never a flower.
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