Any observer who should have seen the neatly-dressed lawyer peering into the broken doors and up the black staircases of Thomas Street, would naturally have supposed his visit connected with some revelation of crime, and that he was either looking up a witness whose testimony might be necessary to save a perilled burglar from Sing Sing, or taking measures to keep one hidden who might have told too much if brought upon the witness-stand. And yet Egbert Crawford was really visiting that den of black squalor with a very different object--to find an old darkey woman who was reported as living in that street, and in his capacity as one of the eleven hundred and fifty Commissioners of Deeds of the City and County of New York, to procure her "X mark" and take her acknowledgment in the little matter of a quitclaim deed. A very harmless purpose, in itself, certainly; and yet the observer might have been nearer right in his suspicion than even the lawyer himself believed, when the whole result of the visit was taken into account. One of the ricketty houses on the south side of the street, not far from the Ellen Jewett house, and not much further from the equally celebrated panel-house which furnished the weekly papers with illustrations of that peculiar species of man-trap a few years ago--seemed to the seeker to bear out the description that had been given him. The door was wide open, and all within appeared to be a sort of dark cabin out of which issued occasional sounds of quarrelling voices and continual puffs of fetid air foul enough to sicken the strongest stomach. He went in, as one of the lost might go into Pandemonium, impelled by an imperious necessity. He mounted the ricketty and creaking stair, with the bannister half gone and the steps groaning beneath his tread as if they contained the spirits of the dead respectability that had left them half a century before. He had been told that the old woman lived on the third floor, and though he met no one he concluded to dare the perils of a second ascent, in spite of the landing place being in almost pitchy darkness. Rushing along with a hasty step that even the gloom could not make a slower one, he felt something bump against his knees and the lower part of his body, and then something human fell to the floor with a crash that had the jingling of broken crockery blended with it.