of gin that sent everybody to the Tombs, and from the Tombs to the grave.  But Lizza was good to me, and used to take care of me, and steal little things for me from old Dan Sullivan, who begged in Broadway, and let Yellow Bill get his money, by getting him tipsy.  And I got to liking Lizza, for we both seemed to have no one in the world who cared for us but English.  And there was always some trouble between the Blazers and the people at the house of the ‘Nine Nations.’

“Well, English was hard to do for some time, and through necessity, which he said a deal about, we were driven out of every place we had sought shelter in.  And English did something they sent him up for a twelve-month for, and I was left to get on as I could.  I was took in by ‘Hard-Fisted Sall,’ who always wore a knuckle-duster, and used to knock everybody down she met, and threatened a dozen times to whip Mr. Fitzgerald, the detective, and used to rob every one she took in tow, and said if she could only knock down and rob the whole pumpkin-headed corporation she should die easy, for then she would know she had done a good thing for the public, whose money they were squandering without once thinking how the condition of such wretches as herself could be bettered.

“English died before he had been up two months.  And death reconciled the little difficulty between him and the McCartys; and old Mrs. McCarty’s liking for him came back, and she went crying to the Bellevue and begged them, saying she was his mother, to let her take his body away and bury it.  They let her have it, and she brought it away to the rookery, in a red coffin, and got a clean sheet of the Blazers, and hung it up beside the coffin, and set four candles on a table, and a little cross between them, and then borrowed a Bible with a cross on it, and laid it upon the coffin.  Then they sent for me.  I cried and kissed poor English, for poor English was the only father I knew, and he was good to me.  I never shall forget what I saw in that little room that night.  I found a dozen friends and the McCartys there, forming a half-circle of curious and demoniacal faces, peering over the body of English, whose face, I thought, formed the only repose in the picture.  There were two small pictures-one of the Saviour, and the other of Kossuth-hung at the head and feet of the corpse; and the light shed a lurid paleness over the living and the dead.  And detective Fitzgerald and another gentleman looked in.

“‘Who’s here to-night?’ says Fitzgerald, in a friendly sort of way.

“’God love ye, Mr. Fitzgerald, poor English is gone!  Indeed, then, it was the will of the Lord, and He’s taken him from us-poor English!’ says Mrs. McCarty.  And Fitzgerald, and the gentleman with him, entered the den, and they shuddered and sat down at the sight of the face in the coffin.  ’Sit down, Mr. Fitzgerald, do!—­and may the Lord love ye!  There was a deal of good in poor English.  He’s gone-so he is!’