eighborhood (there was always a fuss when
Old Bones, the coroner, was about), and frightened so many, that Mrs.
Sullivan couldn't get lodgers for weeks. She used to nail no end of
horse-shoes over the door to keep out the ghosts of them that died last.
But it was a long while before her lodgers got courage enough to come
back. Then we went to the house of the Blazers, in 'Cow Bay,' and used
to lodge there with Yellow Bill. They said Bill was a thief by
profession; but I wasn't old enough to be a judge. Little Lizza Rock,
the nondescript, as people called her, used to live at the Blazers. Poor
Lizza had a hard time of it, and used to sigh and say she wished she was
dead. Nobody thought of her, she said, and she was nothing because she
was deformed, and a cripple. She was about four feet high, had a face
like a bull-dog, and a swollen chest, and a hunchback, a deformed leg,
and went with a crutch. She never combed her hair, and what few rags she
had on her back hung in filth. What few shillings she got were sure to
find their way either into Bill's pocket, or send her tipsy into the
'Bottomless Pit' of the house of the 'Nine Nations.' There was in the
Bottomless Pit a never-ending stream of gin that sent everybody to the
Tombs, and from the Tombs to the grave. But Lizza was good to me, and
used to take care of me, and steal little things for me from old Dan
Sullivan, who begged in Broadway, and let Yellow Bill get his money, by
getting him tipsy. And I got to liking Lizza, for we both seemed to have
no one in the world who cared for us but English. And there was always
some trouble between the Blazers and the people at the house of the
'Nine Nations.'

"Well, English was hard to do for some time, and through necessity,
which he said a deal about, we were driven out of every place we had
sought shelter in. And English did something they sent him up for a
twelve-month for, and I was left to get on as I could. I was took in by
'Hard-Fisted Sall,' who always wore a knuckle-duster, and used to knock
everybody down she met, and threatened a dozen times to whip Mr.
Fitzgerald, the detective, and used to rob every one she took in tow,
and said if she could only knock down and rob the whole pumpkin-headed
corporation she should die easy, for then she would know she had done a
good thing for the public, whose money they were squandering without
once thinking how the condition of such wretches as herself could be
bettered.

"Engli