Few towns, however small, lack their moral plague-spot, and Graves's errand bent him toward New Babylon's, a web of alleys styled the Flats, spun behind the business centre among the docks and rotting warehouses of a vanished commerce. The Flats had its business too--groggeries and a music hall where "sacred concerts" were given on Sunday nights and men had been stabbed on pay-day; groggeries, the music hall--and worse. The young man threaded gingerly into its dingy precincts, and by dint of a handful of Italian, picked up in a Roman winter's sojourn to be oddly practised on a local washerwoman sousing gay garments in the amber fluid of the Erie Canal, he singled out the Hinchey hovel from the squalid score it resembled. Before the sagging threshold tumbled a many-complexioned brood of children,--they seemed a very dozen,--and in the doorway, with arms akimbo and hands on massive hips, gaped Jap's mulatto wife, for of such measure was the man. Graves crossed the alley, suppressing such of his five senses as he could shift without, and ascertained that the degenerate Jasper, true to prophecy, was fishing from the dock in the rear. "Good afternoon," said the caller, affably, he thought. Jasper grunted without lifting his eyes from his float. "What do you catch here?" pursued the candidate, beaming good-fellowship. The line suddenly drew taut, and a muddy fish whipped through the sunshine within a scant inch of Graves's nose. "Bullheads," answered the laconic Hinchey. The visitor was disconcerted. "You--er--eat them?" he remarked blankly, eyeing first the beery-looking water and then the ugly fish. "Naw," sneered Jap. "I'm foundin' 'n 'quarium." He tossed the bullhead into a pail, and, spying a piccaninny scudding round a corner, called: "Here, you chocolate drop, take this yer fish ter yer mammy. Two mor,' 'n' I'll hev 'nuff fer supper. Set down," he added to his guest. "Thanks," said Bernard, hunting vainly for a clean spot on the string-piece. He lit a cigarette as a sanitary precaution, and bethought him to offer one to Hinchey. "None o' them coffin-nails fer me," declined the Spartan. "I smokes men's terbacker." Graves gave him a cigar which he chanced to have about him. "I don't seem to have a match left," he observed, fumbling in his pockets. Jasper Hinchey calmly relieved him of his cigarette, lit his cigar with it, and restored the costly importation, malodorous of fish. At the earliest opportunity Graves dropped it in the canal, a transaction duly noted by Jap. "I've been told you have something to say to me," the young man said briskly, his social obligations seeming fully paid, and his eagerness to be gone swamping diplomacy. Jasper rebaited his hook, impaling the wriggling earthworm with a solicitude worthy of comparison with Isaac Walton's refined martyrdom of frogs. "Yes," he drawled; "I kind o' 'magine I hev." Bernard curbed his impatience while Jap spat with deadly aim at an eddying chip.