my advice and go in there,"
lifting his hand and twitching his thumb upward and over his shoulder
again.

The two girls passed from the room, and the door was shut and locked
inside. No sooner had they done so than Jerkin made a new examination of
the articles, and after satisfying himself as to their value proceeded
to put them out of sight. Lifting aside a screen that covered the
fireplace, he removed from the chimney back, just above the line of
sight, a few loose bricks, and through the hole thus made thrust the
articles he had bought, letting them drop into a fireplace on the other
side.

On leaving the room of this professional receiver of stolen goods, Pinky
and her friend descended to the second story, and by a door which had
been cut through into the adjoining property passed to the rear building
of the house next door. They found themselves on a landing, or little
square hall, with a stairway passing down to the lower story and another
leading to the room above. A number of persons were going up and coming
down--a forlorn set, for the most part, of all sexes, ages and colors.
Those who were going up appeared eager and hopeful, while those who were
coming down looked disappointed, sorrowful, angry or desperate. There
was a "policy shop" in one of the rooms above, and these were some of
its miserable customers. It was the hour when the morning drawings
of the lotteries were received at the office, or "shop," and the poor
infatuated dupes who had bet on their favorite "rows" were crowding in
to learn the result.

Poor old men and women in scant or wretched clothing, young girls with
faces marred by evil, blotched and bloated creatures of both sexes, with
little that was human in their countenances, except the bare features,
boys and girls not yet in their teens, but old in vice and crime, and
drunkards with shaking nerves,--all these were going up in hope and
coming down in disappointment. Here and there was one of a different
quality, a scantily-dressed woman with a thin, wasted face and hollow
eyes, who had been fighting the wolf and keeping fast hold of her
integrity, or a tender, innocent-looking girl, the messenger of a weak
and shiftless mother, or a pale, bright-eyed boy whose much-worn but
clean and well-kept garments gave sad evidence of a home out of which
prop and stay had been removed. The strong and the weak, the pure and
the defiled, were there. A poor washerwoman who in a moment of weakness
has