“Black-beetle Hole!” ejaculates the lady, whom the reader will have discovered is no less a person than Madame Montford.  Mr. Detective Fitzgerald is the visitor.

“Yes, there’s where she’s got, and it isn’t much of a place, to say the best.  But when a poor creature has no other place to get a stretch down, she stretches down there—­”

“Proceed to how you found her, and what you have got from her concerning the child,” the lady interrupts, with a deep sigh.

“Well,” proceeds the detective, “I meets-havin’ an eye out all the while-Sergeant Dobbs one morning-Dobbs knows every roost in the Points better than me!—­and says he, ’Fitzgerald, that are woman, that crazy woman, you’ve been in tow of so long, has turned up.  There was a row in Black-beetle Hole last night.  I got a force and descended into the place, found it crammed with them half-dead kind of women and men, and three thieves, what wanted to have a fuss with the hag that keeps it.  One on ’em was thrashing the poor crazy woman.  They had torn all the rags off her back.  Howsever, if you wants to fish her out, you’d better be spry about it-’”

The lady interrupts by saying she will disguise, and with his assistance, go bring her from the place-save her!  Mr. Fitzgerald begs she will take the matter practically.  She could not breathe the air of the place, he says.

“‘Thank you Dobbs,’ says I,” he resumes, “and when it got a bit dark I went incog. to Black-beetle’s Hole—­”

“And where is this curious place?” she questions, with an air of anxiety.

“As to that, Madame-well, you wouldn’t know it was lived in, because its underground, and one not up to the entrance never would think it led to a place where human beings crawled in at night.  I don’t wonder so many of ’em does things what get ’em into the Station, and after that treated to a short luxury on the Island.  As I was goin’ on to say, I got myself fortified, started out into the Points, and walked-we take these things practically-down and up the east sidewalk, then stopped in front of the old rotten house that Black-beetle Hole is under.  Then I looks down the wet little stone steps, that ain’t wide enough for a big man to get down, and what lead into the cellar.  Some call it Black-beetle Hole, and then again some call it the Hole of the Black-beetles.  ’Yer after no good, Mr. Fitzgerald,’ says Mrs. McQuade, whose husband keeps the junk-shop over the Hole, putting her malicious face out of the window.

“‘You’re the woman I want, Mrs. McQuade,’ says I.  ‘Don’t be puttin’ your foot in the house,’ says she.  And when I got her temper a little down by telling her I only wanted to know who lived in the Hole, she swore by all the saints it had niver a soul in it, and was hard closed up.  Being well up to the dodges of the Points folks, I descended the steps, and gettin’ underground, knocked at the Hole door, and then sent it smash in.  ‘Well! who’s here?’ says I.  ’It’s me,’ says Mrs. Lynch, a knot of an old woman, who has kept the Hole for many years, and says she has no fear of the devil.”