“Bless you,” again interrupts Mr. Soloman, tipping his glass very politely, “I never-that is, when I hear our people who get themselves laced into narrow-stringed Calvinism, and long-founded foreign missions, talk-think much could have come of the dark ages.  I speak after the manner of an attorney, when I say this.  We hear a deal of the dark ages, the crimes of the dark ages, the dark idolatry of darker Africa.  My word for it, and it’s something, if they had anything darker in Sodom; if they had in Babylon a state of degradation more hardened of crime; if in Egypt there existed a benightedness more stubbornly opposed to the laws of God-than is to be found in that New York; that city of merchant princes with princely palaces; that modern Pompeii into which a mighty commerce teems its mightier gold, where a coarse throng revel in coarser luxury, where a thousand gaudy churches rear heavenward their gaudier steeples, then I have no pity for Sodom, not a tear to shed over fallen Babylon, and very little love for Egypt.”  Mr. Snivel concludes, saying—­“proceed, young man.”

“Of my mother I know nothing.  My father (I mean the man I called father, but who they said was not my father, though he was the only one that cared anything for me) was Tom English, who used to live here and there with me about the Points.  He was always looking in at Paddy Pie’s, in Orange street, and Paddy Pie got all his money, and then Paddy Pie and him quarrelled, and we were turned out of Paddy Pie’s house.  So we used to lodge here and there, in the cellars about the Points, in ‘Cut Throat Alley,’ or ‘Cow Bay,’ or ‘Murderer’s Alley,’ or in ‘The House of the Nine Nations,’ or wherever we could get a sixpenny rag to lay down upon.  Nobody but English seemed to care for me, and English cared for nobody but me.  And English got thick with Mrs. McCarty and her three daughters—­they kept the Rookery in ‘Cow Bay,’ which we used to get to up a long pair of stairs outside, and which God knows I never want to think of again,—­where sometimes fourteen or fifteen of us, men and women, used to sleep in a little room Mrs. McCarty paid eight dollars a month for.  And Mr. Crown, who always seemed a cross sort of man, and was agent for all the houses on the Points I thought, used to say she had it too cheap.  And English got to thinking a good deal of Mrs. McCarty, and Mrs. McCarty’s daughters got to thinking a good deal of him.  And Boatswain Bill, who lived at the house of the ’Nine Nations’-the house they said had a bottomless pit-and English used to fight a deal about the Miss McCartys, and Bill one night threw English over the high stoop, down upon the pavement, and broke his arms.  They said it was a wonder it hadn’t a broken his neck.  Fighting Mary (Mary didn’t go by that name then) came up and took English’s part, and whipped Boatswain Bill, and said she’d whip the whole house of the ‘Nine Nations’ if it had spunk enough in it to come on.  But no one dare have a set-to with Mary.  Mary used