Pass out!  Pass on!  Know that there are thousands of such abodes in our cities.  An awful, gloomy, and overwhelming picture is the city in the third watch.

After midnight the crime of the city does its chief work.  At eight and a half o’clock in the evening the criminals of the city are at leisure.  They are mostly in the drinking saloons.  It needs courage to do what they propose to do.  Rum makes men reckless.  They are getting their brain and hand just right.  Toward midnight they go to their garrets.  They gather their tools.  Soon after the third watch they stalk forth, silently, looking out for the police, through the alleys to their appointed work.  This is a burglar; and the door-lock will fly open at the touch of the false keys.  That is an incendiary; and before morning there will be a light on the sky, and a cry of “Fire!  Fire!” That is an assassin; and a lifeless body will be found to-morrow in some of the vacant lots.

During all the day there are hundreds of villains to be found lounging about, a part of the time asleep, apart of the time awake; but at twelve to-night they will rouse up, and their eyes will be keen, and their minds acute, and their arms strong, and their foot fleet to fly or pursue.  Many of them have been brought up to the work.  They were born in a thief’s garret.  Their childish plaything was a burglar’s dark lantern.  As long ago as they can remember, they saw, toward morning, the mother binding up the father’s head, wounded by a watchman’s billet.  They began by picking boys’ pockets, and now they can dig an underground passage to the cellar of the bank, or will blast open the door of the gold vault.  So long as the children of the street are neglected there will be no lack of desperadoes.

In the third watch of the night the gambling-houses are in full blast.  What though the hours of the night are slipping away, and the wife sits waiting in the cheerless home!  Stir up the fires!  Bring on the drinks!  Put up the stakes!  A whole fortune may be made before morning!  Some of the firms that two years ago first put out their sign of copartnership have already foundered on the gambler’s table.  The money-drawer in many a mercantile house will this year mysteriously spring a leak.  Gaming is a portentous vice, and is making great efforts to become respectable.  Recently a member of Congress played with a member elect, carrying off a trophy of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars.  The old-fashioned way of getting a fortune is too slow!  Let us toss up and see who shall have it!

And so it goes, from the wheezing wretches who pitch pennies in a rum grocery, to the millionnaire gamblers in the gold-market.

After midnight the eye of God will look down and see uncounted gambling-saloons plying their destruction.  Passing down the street to-night, you may hear the wrangling of the gamblers mingling with the rattle of the dice, and the clear, sharp crack of the balls on the billiard-table.