swarms of wasting beings seek a hiding-place, inhale pestilential air, and die.  Gutters running with seething matter; homeless outcasts sitting, besotted, on crazy door-steps; the vicious, with savage visage, and keen, watchful eye, loitering at the doors of filthy “groceries;” the sickly and neglected child crawling upon the side-pave, or seeking a crust to appease its hunger-all are found here, gasping, in rags, a breath of air by day, or seeking a shelter, at night, in dens so abject that the world can furnish no counterpart.  And this forlorn picture of dilapidated houses, half-clad, squabbish women, blistered-faced men, and sickly children, the house of the Nine Nations overlooks.  And yet this house, to the disgrace of an opulent people be it said, is but the sample of an hundred others standing in the same neighborhood.

With its basement-doors opening into its bottomless pit; with its continual outgoing and ingoing of sooty and cruel-visaged denizens; with its rickety old steps leading to the second story; with its battered windows, begrimed walls, demolished shutters, clapboards hanging at sixes and sevens-with its suspicious aspect;—­there it stands, with its distained sign over the doors of its bottomless pit.  You may read on this sign, that a gentleman from Ireland, who for convenience’ sake we will call Mr. Krone, is licensed to sell imported and other liquors.

Indeed the house of the Nine Nations would seem to say within itself:  “I am mother of this banquet of death you behold with your eyes.”  There it stands, its stream of poison hurrying its victims to the grave; its little dark passages leading to curious hiding-places; its caving roof, and its ominous-looking back platform, overlooking the dead walls of Murderers’ Yard.  How it mocks your philanthropy, your regal edifices, your boasted charities-your gorgeous churches!  Everybody but the corporation knows the house of the Nine Nations, a haunt for wasted prostitutes, assassins, burglars, thieves-every grade of criminals known to depraved nature.  The corporation would seem either to have a charming sympathy for it, or to look upon it with that good-natured indifference so happily illustrated while eating its oysters and drinking its whiskey.  An empty-headed corporation is sure always to have its hands very full, which is the case with yours at this moment.  Having the people’s money to waste, its own ambition to serve, and its hat to fill with political waste paper-what more would you ask of it?

The man of the house of the Nine Nations, you ought to know, makes criminals by the hundred, deluges your alms houses with paupers, and makes your Potters’ field reek with his victims:  for this he is become rich.  Mr. Krone is an intimate friend of more than one Councilman, and a man of much measure in the political world-that is, Mr. Krone is a politician-maker.  When you say there exists too close an intimacy between the pugilist and the politician, Mr. Krone will bet