nements. Colored cotton
handkerchiefs wrapping woolly heads, and shoes slouched at the heel
furnishing doubtful covering to feet redolent of filth and crippled by
disease--alternate with the scanty habiliments of black and white
children, brought up in the kennel and reduced by blows, mud and
exposure to a woful similarity of hue. The whiskey bottle generally
accompanies the basket with a quart of decayed potatoes, from the
grocery at the corner; and even the begged calf's-liver or the stolen
beef-bone comes home accompanied by a flavor of bad gin. It is no wonder
that the few shutters hang by the eye-lids, and that even the wagon-boys
who vend antediluvian vegetables from castaway wagons drawn by
twenty-shilling horse-frames, hurry through without any hope in the
yells intended to attract custom.

Any observer who should have seen the neatly-dressed lawyer peering into
the broken doors and up the black staircases of Thomas Street, would
naturally have supposed his visit connected with some revelation of
crime, and that he was either looking up a witness whose testimony might
be necessary to save a perilled burglar from Sing Sing, or taking
measures to keep one hidden who might have told too much if brought upon
the witness-stand. And yet Egbert Crawford was really visiting that den
of black squalor with a very different object--to find an old darkey
woman who was reported as living in that street, and in his capacity as
one of the eleven hundred and fifty Commissioners of Deeds of the City
and County of New York, to procure her "X mark" and take her
acknowledgment in the little matter of a quitclaim deed. A very harmless
purpose, in itself, certainly; and yet the observer might have been
nearer right in his suspicion than even the lawyer himself believed,
when the whole result of the visit was taken into account.

One of the ricketty houses on the south side of the street, not far from
the Ellen Jewett house, and not much further from the equally celebrated
panel-house which furnished the weekly papers with illustrations of that
peculiar species of man-trap a few years ago--seemed to the seeker to
bear out the description that had been given him. The door was wide
open, and all within appeared to be a sort of dark cabin out of which
issued occasional sounds of quarrelling voices and continual puffs of
fetid air foul enough to sicken the strongest stomach. He went in, as
one of the lost might go into Pandemonium, impel