“Well, then, Fine Feathers, I ain’t the time to waste in washing. I has to work for my living, I has.” “Oh!” said the child, accepting the excuse and trying to understand it. But she turned her head away from the ragpicker to try to catch a whiff of fresh air from the end of the street, that ran to the river. “A-sniffing ag’in,” said the hag. “I can’t help it, ma’am,” Owlet said, in apology. “Oh, she can’t help sniffing! Fine Feathers can’t help sniffing! He, he, he! If she can’t ’elp sniffing out here in the hopen air, ’ow will she stand it in the ’ouse? Oh, deary me!” muttered the crone to nobody in particular, as she turned the last corner in their progress through this hell and entered a dark and narrow alley more poverty stricken, squalid and Heaven-forsaken than any thoroughfare they had yet passed. The alley ran through the middle of an old city square, and was flanked on each side by dilapidated brick buildings that had once been the stables, coach houses, etc., of the rich dwellers in the mansions fronting on the streets of the square. But as these mansions had long been turned into stores, saloons and workshops, so the outhouses had been converted into tenements of the most objectionable description. But if there were no street lamps in this alley, neither was there a “dive” or a “bucket shop,” which might account for the quietness as well as the darkness of the place. The sun had so long set that even the twilight had faded away. No light reached the alley except from the distant lamps of the two streets upon which it opened, and from an occasional lamp in a few of the buildings. So at this hour there was not much to be seen, but very much too much to be smelt, for a fetid gutter ran, or rather stagnated, through the middle of the alley, and seemed to be the receptacle of all the slops from all the wretched tenements on either side of the way. These buildings were all in the last stages of dilapidation in which it was possible for human beings to find shelter with safety. Walls were moldering away; doors and window shutters broken off their hinges or hanging by one hinge, or by a leather substitute; sashes without glass, and the place of it supplied with foul and pestilential rags. It was a thickly crowded yet not a noisy place. In fact, it was so quiet and almost deserted that it was safe to suppose the wretched inhabitants who were not in the tumbling tenements were off to those favorite resorts, the “dives” and “bucket shops” of the neighboring streets. Some very few miserable children, and fewer still of more miserable women, might be dimly seen, here and there, squatting on the falling front steps of the buildings, or loitering about them. “I don’t like this place,” said Owlet, as soon as they had turned into the alley; “I don’t like this place one bit. I wouldn’t live here for a dollar. I didn’t know we had to come through this place to get to Lady’s house.”