and within a short walk of the Five Points, I took a deep interest in Mr. Pease’s Christian undertaking, and aided him by every means in my power.  His wife became a member of my church.  The “Wild Maggie,” whose escapades described in the Tribune gained such public notoriety, became also, after her reformation, one of our church members and afterwards held the position of a school teacher.  After the resignation of Mr. Pease and his removal to North Carolina, his place was taken by one of our Market Street elders, the devout and godly minded Benjamin R. Barlow.  In order to keep awake public interest in the mission work at the Five Points, and to get ammunition, in its behalf, I used to make nocturnal explorations of some of those satanic quarters.  I recall now one of those midnight forays of which, at the risk of my reader’s olfactories, I will give a brief glimpse.  In company with the superintendent of the mission and a policeman and a lad with a lantern I struck for the “Cow Bay,” the classic spot of which Charles Dickens had given such a piquant description in his “American Notes” a few years before.  Climbing a stairway, from which the banisters had long been broken away for firewood, we entered a dark room.  There was only a tallow candle burning in the corner, and in the room were huddled twenty-five human beings.  Along the walls were ranged the bunks—­one above the other—­covered with rotting quilts and unwashed coverings.  Each of these rented for sixpence a night to any thief or beggar who chose to apply for lodging—­no distinction being made for sex or color.  As the lad swings the lantern about we spy the rows of heads projecting from under the stacks of rags.  In one bed a gray-haired, disheveled head cuddled close to the yellow locks of a slumbering child.  While we are reconnoitering, something like a huge dog runs past and dives under the bed.  “What is this, good friend?” we ask.  “Oh, only the goat,” replied a merry Milesian.  “Do the goats live with you all in this room?” “To be sure they do, sir; we feeds ’em tater skins, and milks ’em for the babies,” Country born as we were, we have often longed to keep a dairy in this city, but it never occurred to us that a bedroom was sufficient for the purpose.  Truly, necessity is the shrewd-witted mother of invention!  Opposite “Cow Bay” was “Cut-Throat Alley.”  Two murders a year were about the average product of the civilization of this dark defile.  The keeper of the famous grog shop there, who died about that time, left a fortune of nearly one hundred thousand dollars.  In city politics the keeper of such a den is one of the leaders of public opinion.  We climbed a stairway, dark and dangerous, till at length we reached the wretched garret through whose open chinks the snow drifted in upon the floor.  Beside the single broken stove, the only article of furniture in the apartments, sat a wretched woman wrapped in a tattered shawl moaning over a terrible burn that covered her arms; she had fallen when intoxicated