no one whose industry's unlawfulness has yet
earned him the dignity of a nickname. Indeed, it is difficult to find
people now who remember the old gorgeous days, although it is but two
years since the lane shone with sin like a new head-light. But after a
search the reporter found three.

Mammy Ross is one of the last relics of the days of slaughter still
living there. Her weird history also reaches back to the blossoming of
the first members of the Whyo gang in the Old Sixth Ward, and her mind
is stored with bloody memories. She at one time kept a sailors'
boarding-house near the Tombs prison, and the accounts of all the
festive crimes of that neighbourhood in ancient years roll easily from
her tongue. They killed a sailor man every day, and pedestrians went
about the streets wearing stoves for fear of the handy knives. At the
present day the route to Mammy's home is up a flight of grimy stairs
that are pasted on the outside of an old and tottering frame house. Then
there is a hall blacker than a wolf's throat, and this hall leads to a
little kitchen where Mammy usually sits groaning by the fire. She is, of
course, very old, and she is also very fat. She seems always to be in
great pain. She says she is suffering from "de very las' dregs of de
yaller fever."

During the first part of a reporter's recent visit, old Mammy seemed
most dolefully oppressed by her various diseases. Her great body shook
and her teeth clicked spasmodically during her long and painful
respirations. From time to time she reached her trembling hand and drew
a shawl closer about her shoulders. She presented as true a picture of a
person undergoing steady, unchangeable, chronic pain as a patent
medicine firm could wish to discover for miraculous purposes. She
breathed like a fish thrown out on the bank, and her old head
continually quivered in the nervous tremors of the extremely aged and
debilitated person. Meanwhile her daughter hung over the stove and
placidly cooked sausages.

Appeals were made to the old woman's memory. Various personages who had
been sublime figures of crime in the long-gone days were mentioned to
her, and presently her eyes began to brighten. Her head no longer
quivered. She seemed to lose for a period her sense of pain in the
gentle excitement caused by the invocation of the spirits of her memory.

It appears that she had had a historic quarrel with Apple Mag. She first
recited the prowess of Apple Mag; how this emphati