"I don't wonder that you look inquiringly at me, as much as to say, 'is that you?' Yes, it is me, Tom Nolan, the mason, me who used to lay around the dirty rum holes with you, begging, lying, stealing, to get a drink. Do you think that now I would pick up old cigar stumps and quids of tobacco, to fill my pipe? Do you think I would wear a hat, as I have done, that my poor beggared boy picked out of the street? Look at that. Does that look like the old battered thing I used to wear? Do these clothes look like the dirty rags I wore when you and I slept in Cale Jones's coal-box? Do I look like the drunken Tom Nolan that kept a family of starving beggars, with two other families, in one room, ten by twelve feet square; and that a garret room, without fireplace, without glass in its one window; with the roof so low that I could only stand up straight in one corner; and that mean room in the vilest locality on earth, in a house--ah! whole row of houses, tenanted by just such miserable, rum-beggared human beings--buildings owned by a human monster--houses for the poor which are enough to sicken the vilest of beasts; such as no good man would let for tenements, even when he could get tenants as degraded as I was--tenements that any Christian grand jury would indict, and any court, which desired to protect the lives of the people, would compel the owners to pull down, as the worst, with one exception, of all city nuisances. "How did I live there? How did my wife and children ever live there, in that little miserable room, with seven others, just such wretches as ourselves? How do hundreds of such men, women, and children as we were, still live there? I was in that same room--the place my children used to call _home_--this evening. The entrance is in Cow Bay. If you would like to see it, saturate your handkerchief with camphor, so that you can endure the horrid stench, and enter. Grope your way through the long, dark, narrow passage--turn to your right, up the dark and dangerous stairway; be careful where you place your foot around the lower step, or in the corners of the broad stairs, for it is more than shoe-mouth deep of steaming filth. Be careful too, or you may meet some one--perhaps a man, perhaps a woman--as nature divides the sexes; as the rum seller combines them, both beasts, who in their drunken frenzy may thrust you, for the very hatred of your better clothes, or the fear that you have come to rescue them from their crazy loved dens of death, down, headlong down, those filthy stairs. Up, up, winding up, five stories high, now you are under the black smoky roof; turn to the left--take care and not upset that seething pot of butcher's offal soup, that is cooking upon a little furnace at the head of the stairs--open that door--go in, if you can get in. Look; here is a negro and his wife sitting upon the floor--where else could they sit, for there is no chair--eating their supper off of the bottom of a pail. A broken brown earthen jug holds