may be only the flash before his final and welcome disappearance. [Footnote 5: Written three days before the foundering of the Monitor off Hatteras, Dec. 31st 1862.] Our contraband is a woman, and she comes upon the scene of action in this wise, retrospectively. Some three months before the events recorded in the preceding chapters, to wit about the middle of March, Egbert Crawford, Tombs lawyer, doing a thriving business in the line especially affected by such gentry, and not yet elevated to a Colonel's commission in the volunteer army by the parental forethought of Governor Edwin D. Morgan,--had occasion to visit that portion of Thomas Street lying between West Broadway and Hudson. The locality is not by any means a pleasant one, either for the eye or the other senses, and the character of the street is not materially improved by the recollection of the Ellen Jewett murder, which occurred on the south side, within a few doors of Hudson. Garbage left unremoved by Hackley festers alike on pavement, sidewalk and gutter; and a mass of black and white humanity (the former predominating) left unremoved by the civilization of New York in the last half of the nineteenth century, festers within the crazy and tumble-down tenements. Colored cotton handkerchiefs wrapping woolly heads, and shoes slouched at the heel furnishing doubtful covering to feet redolent of filth and crippled by disease--alternate with the scanty habiliments of black and white children, brought up in the kennel and reduced by blows, mud and exposure to a woful similarity of hue. The whiskey bottle generally accompanies the basket with a quart of decayed potatoes, from the grocery at the corner; and even the begged calf's-liver or the stolen beef-bone comes home accompanied by a flavor of bad gin. It is no wonder that the few shutters hang by the eye-lids, and that even the wagon-boys who vend antediluvian vegetables from castaway wagons drawn by twenty-shilling horse-frames, hurry through without any hope in the yells intended to attract custom.