Bats in the Wall; or, The Mystery of Trinity Church-yardRaymond, P. T.
General
Bats in the Wall; or, The Mystery of Trinity Church-yard
Raymond, P. T.
Detective and mystery stories; Detectives -- Juvenile fiction; Dime novels
If one wants to see the Catherine Market in the full tide of its
bustling trade, Sunday morning is the time to come--when the fish
peddlers cluster outside its walls, between the hours of four and five.
They spread themselves up South street; they stand beside their pails,
tubs and baskets on the sidewalk facing the old tumble-down rookeries
on the side of Catherine street to the right of the market itself, and
before the second hand clothing stores on the left.
Blue-fish, white-fish, weak-fish, porgies, twisting eels, and soft
clams strung on strings, lobsters alive and lobsters boiled, soft-shell
crabs, packed in moss-lined boxes, hard-shell crabs, not packed at
all--all are spread about outside of this singular building on the
sidewalk in the gutter--yes, even in the very street itself, while the
bawling of the fishermen as they cry the merits of their wares, the
cackle of housewives, moving about here and there with giant market
baskets on their arms, are all mingled in one unearthly clatter and din.
Nor is this all.
Other branches of trade must needs elbow their way into this busy spot
as well, all carried on from baskets in the open streets, be it plainly
understood, whose owners sit or stand beside them on the pavement as
best they can.
But waste no time in seeking what is new.
This is most emphatically the bartering-place of the worn and old.
Second-hand coats, trousers, hats and shoes. Damaged crockery, rusty
cutlery, half-worn articles of ladies' apparel, whose uses we would, of
course, not even dare to name. Lace curtains, kitchen pots and pans,
cheap chromos, candlesticks and beads, all are represented here, while
small peddlers, whose stock in trade is carried in their hands, move
here and there in the crowd, adding, with their various cries, to the
strangeness of the scene.
We left Detective Hook by the church-yard wall at the moment of his
encounter with the woman who with strange mutterings hurried past.
We find him at the early hour of half-past four moving down Catherine
street in the direction of the singular scene we have just described.
And just before him is the woman, still treading wearily along the
snow-covered sidewalk, her wild eyes ever roving here and there, now
to the right and now to the left, never resting for even one moment of
time.
The storm has ceased at last. The clouds have rolled away to the
eastward; the stars shine brightly in the cold, wintry sky.
And the busy market is teeming with activity and life while the
remainder of the great city is still locked in slumber and repose.
Who is this strange creature with her singular mutterings concerning
"bats in the wall?"
It is just this that the detective sought to learn; and in the endeavor
to learn it had not suffered the woman to pass from his observation
from the moment of their first encounter until now.
At the instant of their meeting he had stopped her and questioned her
sharply.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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