and against an atmosphere thick of disease.  Now a faint light flashes through a crevice in the left wall, plays fantastically upon the black surface of the opposite, then dies away.  The detective lights his lantern, stands a moment with his ear turned, as if listening to the revelry in the bottomless pit.  A door opens to his touch, he enters a cave-like room-it is the one from out which the light stole so curiously, and in which all is misery and sadness.  A few embers still burn in a great brick fire-place, shedding a lurid glow over the damp, filthy walls, the discolored ceiling, and the grotesque group upon the floor.  “You needn’t come at this time of night-we are all honest people;” speaks a massive negro, of savage visage, who (he is clothed in rags) sits at the left side of the fireplace.  He coaxes the remnant of his fire to cook some coarse food he has placed in a small, black stew-pan, he watches with steady gaze.  Three white females (we blush to say it), their bare, brawny arms resting on their knees, and their disfigured faces drooped into their hands, form an half circle on the opposite side.

“The world don’t think nothin’ of us down here-we haven’t had a bite to eat to-night,” gruffly resumes the negro.

“May them that have riches enjoy them, for to be supperless is no uncommon thing wid us,” interrupts one of the women, gathering about her the shreds of her tattered garment, parting the matted hair over her face, and revealing her ghastly features.  The detective turns his light full upon her.  “If we live we live, if we die we die-nobody cares!  Look you yonder, Mr. Fitzgerald,” continues the negro, with a sarcastic leer.  Turning his light to where the negro points, the detective casts a glance into the shadow, and there discovers the rags move.  A dozen pair of glassy eyes are seen peering from out the filthy coverings, over which lean arms and blanched hands keep up an incessant motion.  Here an emaciated and heart-sick Welsh girl, of thirteen (enciente) lays shivering on the broken floor; there an half-famished Scotch woman, two moaning children nestling at her heart, suffers uncovered upon a pallet of straw.  The busy world without would seem not to have a care for her; the clergy have got the heathen world upon their shoulders.  Hunger, like a grim tyrant, has driven her to seek shelter in this wretched abode.  Despair has made her but too anxious that the grave or prison walls should close the record of her sorrows.  How tightly she with her right hand presses her babe to her bosom; how appealingly with her left she asks a pittance of the detective!  Will he not save from death her starving child?  He has nothing to give her, turns his head, answers only with a look of pity, and moves slowly towards the door.

“You have not been long off the Island, Washington?” inquires the detective, with an air of familiarity.