glass.

"We came up together--knew each other, but not ourselves. That was our
dark age." George pauses for a moment.

"Bless you," again interrupts Mr. Soloman, tipping his glass very
politely, "I never--that is, when I hear our people who get themselves
laced into narrow-stringed Calvinism, and long-founded foreign missions,
talk--think much could have come of the dark ages. I speak after the
manner of an attorney, when I say this. We hear a deal of the dark ages,
the crimes of the dark ages, the dark idolatry of darker Africa. My word
for it, and it's something, if they had anything darker in Sodom; if
they had in Babylon a state of degradation more hardened of crime; if
in Egypt there existed a benightedness more stubbornly opposed to the
laws of God--than is to be found in that New York; that city of merchant
princes with princely palaces; that modern Pompeii into which a mighty
commerce teems its mightier gold, where a coarse throng revel in coarser
luxury, where a thousand gaudy churches rear heavenward their gaudier
steeples, then I have no pity for Sodom, not a tear to shed over fallen
Babylon, and very little love for Egypt." Mr. Snivel concludes,
saying--"proceed, young man."

"Of my mother I know nothing. My father (I mean the man I called father,
but who they said was not my father, though he was the only one that
cared anything for me) was Tom English, who used to live here and there
with me about the Points. He was always looking in at Paddy Pie's, in
Orange street, and Paddy Pie got all his money, and then Paddy Pie and
him quarrelled, and we were turned out of Paddy Pie's house. So we used
to lodge here and there, in the cellars about the Points, in 'Cut Throat
Alley,' or 'Cow Bay,' or 'Murderer's Alley,' or in 'The House of the
Nine Nations,' or wherever we could get a sixpenny rag to lay down upon.
Nobody but English seemed to care for me, and English cared for nobody
but me. And English got thick with Mrs. McCarty and her three
daughters--they kept the Rookery in 'Cow Bay,' which we used to get to
up a long pair of stairs outside, and which God knows I never want to
think of again,--where sometimes fourteen or fifteen of us, men and
women, used to sleep in a little room Mrs. McCarty paid eight dollars a
month for. And Mr. Crown, who always seemed a cross sort of man, and was
agent for all the houses on the Points I thought, used to say she had it
too cheap. And English got to thinking a good deal o