to drink a deal of gin, and say-’this gin and the devil ’ll get us all one of these days.  I wonder if Mr. Crown ’ll sell bad gin to his highness when he gets him?” Well, Bill was sent up for six months, so the McCartys had peace in the house, and Mrs. McCarty got him little things, and did for English until his arms got well.  Then he got a little money, (I don’t know how he got it,) and Paddy Pie made good friends with him, and got him from the Rookery, and then all his money.  I used to think all the money in the Points found its way either to the house of Paddy Pie, or the Bottomless Pit at the house of the ‘Nine Nations,’ and all the clothes to the sign of the ’Three Martyrs,’ which the man with the eagle face kept round the corner.

“English used to say in one of his troubled fits, ’I’d like to be a respectable man, and get out of this, if there was a chance, and do something for you, George.  There’s no chance, you see.’  And when we went into Broadway, which we did now and then, and saw what another world it was, and how rich everything looked, English used to shake his head and say, ‘they don’t know how we live, George.’

“Paddy Pie soon quarrelled with English, and being penniless again we had to shift for ourselves.  English didn’t like to go back to Mrs. McCarty, so we used to sleep at Mrs. Sullivan’s cellar in ’Cut Throat Alley.’  And Mrs. Sullivan’s cellar was only about twelve feet by twenty, and high enough to stand up in, and wet enough for anything, and so overrun with rats and vermin that we couldn’t sleep.  There were nine rag-beds in the cellar, which as many as twenty-three would sometimes sleep on, or, if they were not too tipsy, try to sleep on.  And folks used to come into the cellar at night, and be found dead in the morning.  This made such a fuss in the neighborhood (there was always a fuss when Old Bones, the coroner, was about), and frightened so many, that Mrs. Sullivan couldn’t get lodgers for weeks.  She used to nail no end of horse-shoes over the door to keep out the ghosts of them that died last.  But it was a long while before her lodgers got courage enough to come back.  Then we went to the house of the Blazers, in ’Cow Bay,’ and used to lodge there with Yellow Bill.  They said Bill was a thief by profession; but I wasn’t old enough to be a judge.  Little Lizza Rock, the nondescript, as people called her, used to live at the Blazers.  Poor Lizza had a hard time of it, and used to sigh and say she wished she was dead.  Nobody thought of her, she said, and she was nothing because she was deformed, and a cripple.  She was about four feet high, had a face like a bull-dog, and a swollen chest, and a hunchback, a deformed leg, and went with a crutch.  She never combed her hair, and what few rags she had on her back hung in filth.  What few shillings she got were sure to find their way either into Bill’s pocket, or send her tipsy into the ‘Bottomless Pit’ of the house of the ‘Nine Nations.’  There was in the Bottomless Pit a never-ending stream