By day that somber building seems to hide behind the grim planks of the elevated railroad; it is ugly, neglected, innocent; under its protecting wings are the stalls of white-aproned butchers and the open establishments of green-grocers and hucksters plying their several occupations. But no sooner does the darkness drop its curtain over the webbed streets, the dirty courts, and the foul alleys that surround the place, than Jefferson Market ceases to be a building for the dispensation of food and becomes a court for the dispensation of the commodity that we carelessly label Justice. The hands of the large clock in the high tower are hurried toward the hour of twelve; long rays of sinister light are shot from windows narrow and barred; and under a vaulted entrance-way there pours, from year's end to year's end, an unending army of those women of the street who have lost, for one reason or another, their ability any longer to purchase the protection of the Law. It is not often that what the statutes designate as crime comes to the Night Court: Crime may wait for the morning. It is the drunkard, the vagrant, the licenseless pedlar, and, above all, unfriended Maria Peripatetica, the human being that humanity has spoiled in the making, who is taken there. Above all, the Marias Peripateticæ that have, once fostered by the Law, quarreled with it, failed to bribe it, or openly rebelled against it. Black and white, short-skirted and gray-haired, besilked and bedraggled, from nine in the evening until early morning, five thousand in a twelvemonth, they are brought to the Jefferson Market Court for judgment from the power that has made them what they are. And judgment is what they receive. The law is a mill that was made to grind out one thing, and can grind no other; the courts were constituted to make criminals and to punish them, not to prevent or to cure; our present justice is not mercy; it is formulæ, not sentiment. There is one woman that has some small authority in this tribunal, one woman that sees an occasional girl with some promise in her face and takes her away to Waverley House for observation and to be given, if all goes well, a chance at other employment; but Waverley House is small, it is poor, and there is small chance for her that has been twice stricken. One woman cannot do much against the grinding mill, and the grinding mill, between January and December, sends only seventeen girls to a semi-sane reformatory as compared to three thousand that it sends to the university of crime which is known as "The Island."