“And they got the money all away?” interrupts the detective.

“Faith, an’ she’ll not have a blessed dollar come daylight,” continues the man, resuming his pallet.

The detective bids Mrs. Murphy good night, and is soon groping his way over a rickety old floor, along a dark, narrow passage, scarce high enough to admit him, and running at right angles with the first.  A door on the left opens into a grotto-like place, the sickly atmosphere of which seems hurling its poison into the very blood.  “Who’s here?” inquires the detective, and a voice, feeble and hollow, responds:  “Lodgers!”

The damp, greasy walls; the broken ceilings; the sooty fireplace, with its shattered bricks; the decayed wainscoating-its dark, forlorn aspect, all bespeak it the fit abode of rats.  And yet Mr. Krone thinks it comfortable enough (the authorities think Mr. Krone the best judge) for the accommodation of thirteen remnants of human misery, all of whom are here huddled together on the wet, broken floor, borrowing warmth of one another.  The detective’s light falls curiously upon the dread picture, which he stands contemplating.  A pale, sickly girl, of some eleven summers, her hair falling wildly over her wan features, lays upon some rags near the fireplace, clinging to an inebriated mother.  Here a father, heartsick and prostrate with disease, seeks to keep warm his three ragged children, nestling about him.  An homeless outcast, necessity forces him to send them out to prey upon the community by day, and to seek in this wretched hovel a shelter at night.  Yonder the rags are thrown back, a moving mass is disclosed, and there protrudes a disfigured face, made ghostly by the shadow of the detective’s lantern.  At the detective’s feet a prostrate girl, insensible of gin, is seized with convulsions, clutches with wasted hands at the few rags about her poor, flabby body, then with fingers grasping, and teeth firmly set, her whole frame writhes in agony.  Your missionary never whispered a kind, encouraging word in her ear; his hand never pressed that blanched bone with which she now saddens your heart!  Different might it have been with her had some gentle-tongued Brother Spyke sought her out, bore patiently with her waywardness, snatched her from this life of shame, and placed her high in an atmosphere of light and love.

It is here, gentle shepherds, the benighted stand most in need of your labors.  Seek not to evangelize the Mahomedan world until you have worked a reform here; and when you have done it, a monument in heaven will be your reward.

“Mr. Toddleworth is not here,” says the detective, withdrawing into the passage, then ascending a broken and steep stairs that lead into the third story.  Nine shivering forms crouched in one dismal room; four squabbish women, and three besotted men in another; and in a third, nine ragged boys and two small girls-such are the scenes of squalid misery presented here.  In a little front room, Mr. Tom