too near to be slighted. I wonder if I shouldn't have
borrowed somebody's old coat."

It had been wiser, certainly. In Garden Street all the houses had been
closed and dark, but here they were open and often brightly lighted and
noisy from cellar to roof. Men, women, and frequently children, jostled
him on the pavement, and he felt his pockets touched more than once. But
he wasn't Caleb Sweetwater of the New York department of police for
nothing. He laughed, bantered, fought his way through and finally
reached the quieter region and, at this hour, the almost deserted one,
of the markets. Sixty-two was not far off, and, pausing a moment to
consider his course, he mechanically took in the surroundings. He was
surprised to find himself almost in the open country. The houses
extending on his left were fronted by the booths and stalls of the
market but beyond these were the fields. Interested in this discovery,
and anxious to locate himself exactly, he took his stand under a
favouring gas-lamp, and took out his map.

What he saw, sent him forward in haste. Shops had now taken the place of
tenements, and as these were mostly closed, there were very few persons
on the block, and those were quiet and unobtrusive. He reached a corner
before coming to 62 and was still more interested to perceive that the
street which branched off thus immediately from the markets was a wide
and busy one, offering both a safe and easy approach to dealer and
customer. "I'm on the track," he whispered almost aloud in his secret
self-congratulation. "Sixty-two will prove a decent quiet resort which I
may not be above patronising myself."

But he hesitated when he reached it. Some houses invite and some repel.
This house repelled. Yet there was nothing shabby or mysterious about it.
There was the decent entrance, lighted, but not too brilliantly; a row of
dark windows over it; and, above it all, a sloping roof in which another
sparkle of light drew his attention to an upper row of windows, this
time, of the old dormer shape. An alley ran down one side of the house
to the stables, now locked but later to be thrown open for the use of the
farmers who begin to gather here as early as four o'clock. Nothing wrong
in its appearance, everything ship-shape and yet--"I shall find some
strange characters here," was the Sweetwater comment with which our
detective opened the door and walked into the house.

It was an unusual hour for guests, and the woman who